In the 2009 film “Star Trek,” a supernova hurtles through space and obliterates a planet unfortunate enough to be in its path. Fiction, of course, but it turns out the notion is not so farfetched.
In 2016, researchers published “slam dunk” evidence, based on iron-60 isotopes in ancient seabed, that supernovae buffeted the Earth — one of them about 2.6 million years ago. University of Kansas researcher Adrian Melott, professor of physics and astronomy, supported those findings in Nature with an associated letter, titled “Supernovae in the neighborhood.”
Study finds that if two black holes collide, they would release as much energy as 100 million supernova explosion.
“We’re made of star stuff,” astronomer Carl Sagan famously said. Nuclear reactions that happened in ancient stars generated much of the material that makes up our bodies, our planet and our solar system. When stars explode in violent deaths called supernovae, those newly formed elements escape and spread out in the universe.
Supernova ash has been discovered in fossils that were created by bacteria on Earth, a new study finds.
A team of researchers affiliated with the Warsaw University Observatory has captured for the first time the events that led to a classical nova exploding, the explosion itself and then what happened afterwards. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the team describes how they happened to capture the star activity and why they believe it may help bolster the theory of star hibernation.
Is it possible for a supernova explosion hundreds of light-years away to cause mass extinctions on our planet?
And a supernova has exploded in a nearby galaxy in the constellation Leo.
Some supernovae have a reserve tank of radioactive fuel that cuts in and powers their explosions for three times longer than astronomers had previously thought.
The star SN 2013ej was a very powerful star, and only recently, scientists could give an accurate description on how powerful it really is.
