Observation Of X-rays From Birth Of Supernova Leads To All-out Effort To Record Stellar Death

Wednesday, May 21, 2008 - 16:21 in Astronomy & Space

NASA's Swift satellite caught the rare birth of a supernova earlier this year, allowing astronomers to rapidly deploy ground-based telescopes to follow its evolution and learn about normal stellar explosions. Astronomers have analyzed the data to conclude that the original star was more than 30 times the mass of the sun, but only slightly larger, when its core ran out of fuel and imploded, blowing the star to smithereens.

Read the whole article on Science Daily

More from Science Daily

Latest Science Newsletter

Get the latest and most popular science news articles of the week in your Inbox! It's free!

Check out our next project, Biology.Net