Chasing a stellar blast.An exploding star recently discovered in a nearby galaxy may be a milestone in the study of type 1a supernovas. In this past decade, astronomers have used these stellar explosions, produced when an elderly star called a white dwarf white dwarf, in astronomy, a type of star that is abnormally faint for its white-hot temperature (see mass-luminosity relation). Typically, a white dwarf star has the mass of the sun and the radius of the earth but does not emit enough light or other radiation to be blows up, to determine that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. But despite the importance of these events, no one knows exactly how white dwarfs explode. Because the newfound supernova supernova, a massive star in the latter stages of stellar evolution that suddenly contracts and then explodes, increasing its energy output as much as a billionfold. , dubbed SN 2006X SN 2006X was a Type Ia supernova about 60 million light-years away in Messier 100, a spiral galaxy in the constellation Coma Berenices. The supernovae was independently discovered in early February 2006 by Shoji Suzuki of Japan and Marco Migliardi of Italy. , erupted in a nearby, highly studied galaxy, it could provide a wealth of information. Amateur astronomers in Japan and Italy independently found the supernova on Feb. 4. At the time of the discovery, the supernova was only one-thousandth as bright as its home galaxy, Messier 100, which lies about 60 million light-years from Earth. But over the next 2 weeks, the supernova's glow increased 25-fold. Using the Very Large Telescope The Very Large Telescope Project (VLT) is a system of four separate optical telescopes (the Antu telescope, the Kueyen telescope, the Melipal telescope, and the Yepun telescope) organized in an array formation. Each telescope has an 8.2 m aperture. in Paranal, Chile, Dietrich Baade of the European Southern Observatory European Southern Observatory (ESO), an intergovernmental organization for astronomical research with headquarters in Garching, near Munich, Germany. The ESO began in 1962 as a consortium among Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden. in Garching, Germany, and his colleagues have been measuring SN 2006X'S brightness since its discovery. They announced their findings in a Feb. 23 press release. |
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