One of the basic truisms in astronomy is that, when a massive star ends its life, it goes out with a bang. A big one. A supernova. This titanic explosion is triggered when the star runs out of nuclear fuel in its core. The core collapses in a heartbeat, and the energy generated in that…
Category: Astrophysics
Cassini probe shoots through Saturn’s rings
NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has successfully executed its daring dive through the 1,500-mile-wide gap between Saturn and its rings, the first time a man-made object has navigated through the icy halo that hugs the gas giant. Controllers operating the Deep Space Network antenna in Goldstone, California confirmed data collected during its passage was being received from…
Black Hole Swallowing a Star Mistaken for Brightest Supernova
The universe’s brightest supernova ever may be something far more rare. An extraordinary display of light in a distant galaxy that had been previously dubbed brightest supernova ever turned out to be a giant black hole tearing apart a massive star. The luminous event, named ASASSN-15lh, took place in 2015, inside a galaxy 4 billion…
Supernovae showered Earth with radioactive debris
An international team of scientists has found evidence of a series of massive supernova explosions near our solar system, which showered the Earth with radioactive debris. The scientists found radioactive iron-60 in sediment and crust samples taken from the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans. The iron-60 was concentrated in a period between 3.2 and 1.7…
Shockwave Of An Exploding Star
Shockwaves (aka a “shock breakout”) like this only last for 20 minutes, so it was really exciting for astronomers to capture the moment, which they recorded as a sudden flare of optical light from a distant star. The shock breakout is the initial flash of brightness from the explosion that precedes the big event, as…
A black hole flashing red with the energy of 1,000 Suns
As if black holes needed another horrifyingly weird characteristic, astronomers have observed one of the brightest black hole ‘outbursts’ in years, with each pulse emitting the energy of 1,000 Suns. The event was witnessed back in June 2015 when V404 Cygni, a black hole that lies roughly 7,800 light-years from Earth, dramatically brightened for a…
Milky Way’s black hole spewing cosmic rays
Mysterious high-energy particles known as cosmic rays zip through space at a wide range of energies, some millions of times greater than those produced in the world’s most powerful atom smasher. Scientists have long thought cosmic rays from inside our galaxy come from supernova explosions, but a new study has fingered a second source: the…
Dust in the interstellar wind
Cosmic dust is not simply something to sweep under the rug and forget about. Instead, NSF-funded astronomers are studying and even mapping it to learn more about what it might be hiding from us, where it comes from and what it’s turning into. Some researchers are delving deep down to see how dust comes together…
The Key to the Origin of the Universe
“If you want to know where the universe came from and where it’s going, you need to know about time,” says Joan Vaccaro at the Griffith University’s Center for Quantum Dynamics. “Experiments on subatomic particles over the past 50 years ago show that nature doesn’t treat both directions of time equally. In particular, subatomic particles…
Hawking says his group has solved a black hole puzzle
Stephen Hawking, the world’s most famous living physicist, thinks he has solved a mystery. It’s one that has puzzled scientists for more than 40 years: What happens to information about matter as it falls into a black hole? Black holes are regions in space that contain huge amounts of matter. All that mass is packed…
Links in Time and Space May Form the Universe’s Foundation
In November, construction workers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology came across a time capsule 942 years too soon. Buried in 1957 and intended for 2957, the capsule was a glass cylinder filled with inert gas to preserve its contents; it was even laced with carbon-14 so that future researchers could confirm the year…
Strange Galaxy Discovered Swept By Fierce Oxygen Winds
“I was actually very surprised to discover that this wind is made mostly of oxygen because nobody has seen a galaxy like this before,” says Anna Lia Longinotti of Mexico’s Instituto Nacional de Astrofísica. “Because the galaxy is broadly similar to our own, it raises questions about the history of the Milky Way and the…
