The big blow-up
Friday, December 4, 2009 - 06:14
in Astronomy & Space
What happens when a really gargantuan star - one hundreds of times bigger than our sun - blows up? Although a theory developed years ago describes what the explosion of such an enormous star should look like, no one had actually observed one - until now. An international team, led by scientists in Israel, and including researchers from Germany, the US, UK and China, tracked a supernova - an exploding star - for over a year and a half, and found that it neatly fits the predictions for the explosion of a star of over 150 times the sun's mass. Their findings, which could influence our understanding of everything from natural limits on star size to the evolution of the universe, appeared recently in Nature...