They’re bright, blue-and a bit strange, say Caltech astronomers who are puzzling over the lack of hydrogen in the spectrums of a number of distant stellar explosions. Caltech’s Robert Quimby, detailing the discovery inNature, said that six supernovae of this new type had so far been identified. Back in 2007, Quimby discovered what was then […]
Supernova 2005E, discovered five years ago by the University of California, Berkeley’s Katzman Automatic Imaging Telescope (KAIT), is a calcium-rich supernova that defies categorization, leading astronomers to speculate that it may hint at new and unusual physics. “With the sheer numbers of supernovae we’re detecting, we’re discovering weird ones that may represent different physical mechanisms […]
Astronomers from around the world have combined data from ground and space based telescopes to paint a detailed portrait of a stellar explosion that was briefly brighter than the galaxy that contained it, visible to the naked eye despite originating halfway across the universe. The gamma-ray burst, catalogued as GRB 080319B, was the result of […]
