Word: supernova
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Remember the supernova, that great burst of sky violence that was supposed to be the finest pyrotechnics show the heavens could offer? Forget it. NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory and several ground-based optical telescopes have just witnessed a cosmic blast that makes the supernova look like a popgun...
...that will appear in an upcoming issue of the Astrophysical Journal, took place 240 million light-years away and was, in the words of astronomer Nathan Smith of the University of California, Berkeley, a leader of the observing team, "truly monstrous." About 100 times as powerful as an ordinary supernova, it resulted from the death of a star that was probably 150 times as massive as our sun, or "as massive as a star can get," says Smith. What's more, a similarly huge and unstable star is rumbling a lot closer to Earth than we might like...
...apart from the more common variety by what happened in the center of the star as it was dying. Typically, a massive star exhausts the elemental fuel in its core and begins to collapse inward. The outer layers blow off in a huge flare we recognize as a supernova while the core becomes more and more compressed, eventually forming the infinitely dense node that is a black hole. In SN 2006gy, the sheer mass of the star produced so much core heat and gamma-ray radiation that it created matter and antimatter particle pairs. This blew the star to bits...
...Cosmic Connections” heartthrob and member of the Harvard Origins of Life Initiative, answered FM’s rather-forward question. Let’s see. I would say that seven billion years ago a previous star that was the ancestor of the sun went through a supernova dispersing its newly-formed elements into the galaxy, and then the protostellar cloud that would later become the sun collapsed out of this material, and planets formed around that newly formed star, and those elements are the stuff of which we’re made today. That?...
...start of 1986, in the 197th year of its existence, the American presidency is a political supernova. Rarely, if ever, has the office attracted so much attention in the nation and the world...