Tag: type Ia supernovas
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Weird discrepancy in cosmic measurements has cosmologists puzzled
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] The growing crisis in cosmology For The Week: How rapidly is the universe expanding? Since Edwin Hubble first discovered in 1929 that galaxies are getting farther apart over time,…
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Learning about weird star corpses from the way they shake
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] ‘Dwarfquakes’ Reveal the Future of Our Universe Dying stars were an enigma—until an astronomer measured seismic shifts on them, giving us clues about the sun’s future and the expansion…
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A white dwarf murder mystery
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] What killed the white dwarfs? (Aside from the giant explosion) Merger or extra matter? Two papers come to opposite conclusions For Ars Technica: Type Ia supernovae are explosions that…
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SUPERNOVA!
Pardon me, I’m a little excited. When I logged onto my computer this morning, I found that every astronomer and astronomy fan was talking about the same thing: a new observation of a probable white dwarf supernova in M82, also known as the Cigar Galaxy. This is exciting because M82 is practically a neighbor in…
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Death of a white dwarf, 10 billion years later
White dwarfs are the remnants of the cores of stars like our Sun. They have the mass of a star packed into the volume of Earth, but when they die, their light can be detected across the observable Universe. Researchers using the Hubble Space Telescope identified the farthest white dwarf supernova yet seen, one which…
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Baby boom-ers could be a new type of white dwarf supernova
White dwarf supernovas—more officially known as type Ia supernovas—are important to cosmologists because they all explode in very similar ways. That means they can be used to measure distances to faraway galaxies. However, a peculiar type of supernova, first identified in 2002, has a lot in common with type Ia explosions, but with a lot…
Bowler Hat Science 