Analysis of fragments of the first solids that emerged out of the birth of the sun date our supernova as being 4.6 billion years old.
Betelgeuse, the bright, yellow star at the top of the picture, dimmed considerably in 2020 (as seen in second image) and has since brightened by 50%.
H.Raab/Flickr
Our Sun will likely go out quietly – but not all such stars do. A new radio detection of a supernova can help us better understand these cosmic cataclysms.
Different measures of the rate of the Universe’s expansion give different results – and a new measurement technique only makes matters more complicated.
Our galaxy should be full of traces of dead stars. Until now, we have found surprisingly few of these supernova remnants, but a new telescope collaboration is changing that.
When two neutron stars merge and create a black hole, they produce a powerful blast of gamma rays.
A. Simonnet (Sonoma State Univ.) and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
Gamma-ray bursts occur when a massive star explodes or when two neutron stars merge. A newly discovered burst has puzzled astronomers, as it lasted much longer than astronomers would have expected.
CSIRO ASKAP Science Data Processing/Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre
The discovery of an ancient star in the Milky Way’s halo is providing evidence for another source that would have produced the galaxy’s heavy elements.
Gravitational waves reveal the demise of super-dense neutron stars spiralling into their black hole companions - the first time such strange and exotic star systems have ever been observed.
Traces of radioactive iron from the ocean floor, Antartica and the Moon reveal several waves of dust from distant stars over the past 10 million years.
Artist impression of merging black holes.
Mark Myers, ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav)
New discovery settles a wager between astrophysicists: black holes can merge repeatedly.
Woodcut from Camille Flammarion’s 1888 book L'Atmosphère : météorologie populaire. The caption reads: ‘A missionary of the Middle Ages tells that he had found the point where the sky and the Earth touch’ and continues, ‘What is there, then, in this blue sky, which certainly exists, and which veils the stars during the day?’
Wikipedia
Albert Einstein may have been the ultimate example of a visionary genius, but that did not stop him from twice losing his way due to beliefs that were perhaps not so scientific.
When scientists created the Higgs particle with protons, they needed the 10km-wide Large Hadron Collider. A muon machine could achieve it with a diameter of just 200 metres.
Betelguese is the red star in the top right quarter of the picture.