A supernova that lit up the skies in the year 1006 lived and died fast, leaving no companion star behind, astronomers have found. The result is the latest clue in a puzzle that has been troubling astronomers for some time – how does this type of stellar explosion happen? Supernova 1006 exploded, as seen from [...]

When Brian Schmidt got his PhD in astrophysics in 1993, he was one of less than a handful of people that year that graduated with a thesis on supernovae. Five years later, still working on exploding stars, he would be part of one of two teams that independently discovered that the universe was not only [...]

I took a couple of weeks off blogging while I had my exams at the start of the month. This is what I missed. ESA has approved a billion-euro mission to Jupiter’s icy moons, called Juice (Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer). The spacecraft will (hopefully) launch in 2022 and reach Jupiter eight years later in 2030. [...]

Astronomers have taken a fresh look at an old supernova and found that it was turned inside out during its explosion. Iron, which forms during the stars death, is usually in the centre of the supernova remnant. But in Cassiopeia A they found it on the outside instead. This analysis has also shed some light [...]

They may come from completely different fields of study, but brain scans and supernovae have more in common than you would think. In a new TED talk, Michelle Borkin explains how software developed for use in a hospital was able to help astronomers study the structure of supernovae. An astronomer colleague of Borkin’s at the [...]

When a star becomes a white dwarf — an old, extremely dense star that would have once been similar to our own Sun — the eventful part of its life is over. It releases what heat and light it has left over billions of years, slowly cooling until it no longer shines. Usually. Some white [...]

How did the Christmas gamma-ray burst explode? No, it’s not a geeky Christmas cracker joke, it’s a real question scientists have been trying to answer since Christmas day last year, when a gamma-ray burst called GRB 101225A first lit up the sky. The Christmas burst, as its come to be known, exhibted some rather unusual [...]

Cygnus X is a star forming region in the constellation Cygnus in the night sky. It looks rather pretty in visible light, as shown at the beginning of the video below. But in radio, infrared and gamma ray wavelengths, Cygnus X really comes to life. Recent Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) observations have shown that [...]

In the late 90s there was a race going on between two astronomy collaborations. Both were on the verge of making a discovery that would change the field of cosmology forever, though they may not have realised it at the time. The High-z Supernova Search Team and the Supernova Cosmology Project were both studying a [...]

On February 23rd 1987, the journey of some light that had been travelling for 168,000 years came to an end. Astronomer Ian Shelton at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile was observing the night sky as usual when he saw something out of the ordinary. Not long after Shelton reported the discovery, an astronomer in [...]

The cosmos is full of surprises—not a week goes by without some group of astronomers announcing a perplexing new discovery that upends theory or expectation. But equally important is the difficult and time-consuming research required to firmly pin down what astronomers think they already know. Take, for instance, a new study on the origins of [...]

A superluminous supernova may sound like a designation dreamed up by someone with a penchant for hyperbole, but such explosions are deserving of the extravagant language. They are very big blasts—and two newfound examples originated in the very distant past. Astronomers using two telescopes atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii have discovered a pair of supernovae [...]

What does a supernova sound like? Hopefully we will never find out directly—getting within earshot of an exploding star is probably a bad idea. But a pair of researchers has nonetheless devised a way to represent supernovae in an auditory way, and the result is a rather interesting piece of abstract music. University of Victoria [...]