Word: supernovas
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Nature's most catastrophic events are supernovae-rare stars that burst with a brilliance 100 million times more luminous than the sun, releasing the equivalent of 200 trillion trillion 100-megaton hydrogen bombs. Swiss Astronomer Paul Wild has just added a new one to the stellar log-the first supernova seen from the earth in the unnamed galaxy N.G.C. 4189 in the constellation Virgo...
...Live. Supernovae are the most violent of a group of three exploding stars whose two other members -novae and dwarf novae-periodically flare up for a short time and then return to their original state. By contrast, a supernova is never the same again...
...became possible for radio observers to direct optical astronomers to smaller and more manageable areas. In 1949, astronomers using these directions spotted the first visible object outside the solar system that was associated with a discrete radio source: the Crab Nebula, the remnant of a star explosion (or supernova) in the earth's Milky Way galaxy. Shortly afterward, they identified the first visible source outside the Milky Way: a large galaxy 50 million lightyears* from earth. In the next decade, as radio and optical astronomy continued their fruitful alliance, about 100 additional galaxies and supernovas were recognized as powerful...
...success. Last week, after careful analysis of the spectral lines recorded on his film, Morton was able to offer exciting new evidence toward the solution of an old astronomical enigma: Why are there so many white dwarf stars in the sky when there have been so few of the supernova explosions that are believed to produce them...
...quasars appear to emit enormous quantities of energy that probably could not be produced by nuclear reactions alone. In some cases, Alfvén says, "total annihilation of matter and antimatter may be the only possible energy source." The sudden release of great amounts of energy from a supernova, for example, has never been satisfactorily explained. It might well be caused by the collision of antimatter and matter stars...