Friday 4 April 2008

Exploding Stars

I'm probably a bit late to the news with this one, but it's good stuff, so here it is anyway.

Picture taken by Hubble (Nasa/Esa)

A few weeks ago Hubble managed to catch a rare glimpse of a supernova in its early stages located in the spiral galaxy NGC 2397. When something as hard to catch as this is found it usually provides us with fresh insight into the phenomena in question - in the case of supernovae such as this one, recent findings imply that stars of as low mass as a mere seven times that of the sun may undergo this process, previously thought to occur only in even more massive stars.

Kaboom!

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