Each blast is the extremely bright, super-powerful explosion of a star. RECENT ARTICLES. “It provides a great puzzle—it challenges all our previous theories of explosion mechanisms and power sources of superluminous supernovae.”Working with Jose Prieto at the Universidad Diego Portales in Chile and Kris Stanek, ASAS-SN’s co-principle investigator at Ohio State University, Dong realized the curious spectrum could match that of another superluminous supernovae observed in 2010, but only if the new spectrum had been significantly redshifted—stretched out by the expansion of the universe as it traversed vast cosmic distances. View our
He put the problem to a pair of UCSB graduate students, Jared Goldberg and Evan Bauer, who created more precise simulations of the star’s dying days.There’s no need to worry about the stellar explosion. Dong received the news at 2 a.m. in Beijing; realizing he had probably just found the most powerful supernova ever seen, he became too excited to sleep the rest of the night.In this scenario, the star would first need to blow off its outer layers of gas, followed by the collapse of its core to form the magnetar and the resulting supernova. While unlikely, the idea of a supernova appearing in Earth’s skies caught the public’s attention. Observers slowly came to recognize a class of stars that undergo long-term periodic fluctuations in luminosity. The earliest possible recorded supernova, known as HB9, could have been viewed and recorded by unknown In 393 AD, the Chinese recorded the appearance of another A common belief in Europe during this period was the The true nature of the supernova remained obscure for some time. With all the speculation about what a Betelgeuse supernova would look like from Earth, University of California, Santa Barbara, astronomer Andy Howell got tired of …
They also included observations gathered during Supernova 1987A, which exploded in the Large Magellanic Cloud.Jared Goldberg/University of California, Santa Barbara/MESA+STELLAThis comparison image shows the star Betelgeuse before and after its unprecedented dimming. Safe distance: supernova SN 1987A as seen by the ESO Schmidt Telescope. “We have spent at most about $1 million for this unprecedented capability. Located 168,000 light-years away, this object posed no danger to Earth. Only a direct picture of the neutron star would give definite proof that it exists, but for that astronomers may need to wait a few more decades until the dust and gas in the supernova remnant become more transparent. A plume of gas nearly the size of our solar system erupts from Betelgeuse's surface in this artist's illustration of real observations gathered by astronomers using the Very Large Telescope in Chile.If you stargaze on a clear winter night, it’s hard to miss the constellation Orion the Hunter, with his shield in one arm and the other arm stretched high to the heavens.
We do not sell, rent or trade our email lists. Could Betelgeuse have reached the end of its life? Found: The Most Powerful Supernova Ever Seen. Two teams of astronomers have made a compelling case in the 33-year-old mystery surrounding Supernova 1987A. Receive news, sky-event information, observing tips, and
The findings are published in “ASASSN-15lh is the most powerful supernova discovered in human history,” said lead author Subo Dong, an astronomer at the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Peking University. Aboriginal Australians may have even worked it into their oral histories. An illustration of one of the brightest and most energetic supernova explosions ever recorded. SN 1987A is a stellar explosion that occurred from a star about 20 times the mass of the Sun.. A supernova has to happen But for scientists, Betelgeuse doesn’t have to explode to be interesting. The green and blue hues reveal where the expanding shock wave from the exploded star is colliding with a ring of material around the supernova.