Word: supernova
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...with a clue supplied by NASA astronomers, Michanowsky thinks that he may have found an explanation for both the festival and the inscriptions. The rock carvings, he argues, are apparently a record of a long-forgotten celestial event: a supernova, or exploding star, a spectacle that would have awed primitive people and perhaps frightened them into paying homage to it by staging an orgiastic celebration...
...assumption that some primitive man might have carved his impressions of the great event-markings that could be archaeologically dated to determine more precisely when the Vela supernova occurred-NASA Astronomers John C. Brandt, Stephen P. Maran and Theodore Stecher last year issued an appeal. They asked archaeologists to be on the lookout, especially in the Southern hemisphere-where the Gum nebula can be best observed-for any unidentified ancient symbols that might have been painted or carved to represent the supernova...
...light brighter than the entire galaxy itself that had not been there before. Had a stray asteroid wandered into the telescope's field of view? Closer inspection quickly revealed that the light came not from a nearby asteroid, but from a far more awesome heavenly phenomenon: a supernova, the explosive death of a giant star...
...supernova has been seen in the earth's own Milky Way galaxy for 368 years. But astronomers constantly search for, and frequently observe similar stellar explosions in the universe's myriad other galaxies, or islands of stars. Since the 1930s, for example, astronomers at California's Hale Observatories have photographed some 200 extragalactic supernovae. What makes Kowal's supernova significant to astronomers is that it occurred in a relatively nearby galaxy-only 10 million light-years away. * It is the brightest exploding star sighted in 35 years. Moreover, it seems to have been spotted only days...
According to theory, a supernova occurs after a giantstar- substantially more massive than the sun-has exhausted its thermonuclear fuel. The star's distended gases begin to collapse toward its center of gravity, crush together and reheat to incredible temperatures of 100 billion degrees, and then explode in a fiery outburst as bright as a billion suns. Left at the center of the supernova is a tiny (about ten miles across) star consisting of tightly packed neutrons, or a smaller "black hole"-a star so dense that its tremendous gravity prevents even light from escaping. The 1967 discovery...