All posts tagged: Supernova

The explosive fate of a collapsing star depends on neutrinos

The explosive fate of a collapsing star depends on neutrinos

Published by Jenni Sidey

A dying massive star does not go quietly. Its core collapses, matter crashes inward, neutrinos pour out in staggering numbers, and somewhere in that turmoil the blast either rebounds into a supernova or stalls. What happens in those first moments has long hinged on a difficult question: how those neutrinos behave as they stream through the wreckage of the star. However, new simulations suggest one poorly understood effect, called fast flavor conversion, can push the explosion in opposite directions depending on the kind of star involved. The work comes from Ryuichiro Akaho of Waseda University, Hiroki Nagakura of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, and Shoichi Yamada of Waseda University. Their study, published in Physical Review Letters, tested core-collapse supernova models with a more detailed treatment of neutrino motion. This was a different approach than many earlier efforts used. Where the earlier models fell short Core-collapse supernovae mark the end of massive stars. In the standard picture, neutrinos carry energy out from the collapsed core and help revive the shock wave that can tear the …

Wallbox deploys its first Supernova PowerRing DC fast chargers

Wallbox deploys its first Supernova PowerRing DC fast chargers

Published by skeptic

Photo: Wallbox Wallbox just installed its first public Supernova PowerRing DC fast chargers at Port de Sitges, a busy marina on Spain’s Mediterranean coast near Barcelona. The deployment is the first live use of Wallbox’s new charging setup since the company introduced it in late 2025. PowerRing uses an intelligent power model that we’re seeing more and more in the fast-charging sector: Instead of every charger pulling a fixed amount of power, the system shares available power across multiple chargers based on how many EVs are plugged in and what those vehicles can handle. The Port de Sitges site currently includes three Wallbox Supernova chargers with a shared charging capacity of up to 240 kW once the system is fully enabled. That means if only one EV is charging, it can get more power. If multiple cars are plugged in, the system automatically splits the available capacity between them. Vehicles can receive anywhere from 80 kW to 240 kW. Advertisement – scroll for more content Wallbox says the PowerRing architecture can eventually support up to …

Ancient supernova remnants found in Antarctic ice

Ancient supernova remnants found in Antarctic ice

Published by Jenni Sidey

Earth is quietly collecting fallout from a blast that happened long before humans existed, and a new look at ancient Antarctic ice suggests that material has been riding inside the cloud of gas our Solar System is passing through. An international team led by the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf, or HZDR, reports that Antarctic ice dating from 40,000 to 80,000 years ago contains traces of iron-60, a rare radioactive isotope forged inside massive stars and flung into space when they explode. The amounts are tiny, but they matter. They point to the Local Interstellar Cloud, the patch of interstellar matter now surrounding the Solar System, as a likely long-term reservoir of debris from an ancient stellar explosion. That idea had been proposed before, but it was hard to prove. “Our idea was that the Local Interstellar Cloud contains iron-60 and can store it over long time periods. As the Solar System moves through the cloud, Earth could collect this material. However, we couldn’t prove this at the time,” said Dr. Dominik Koll of HZDR’s Institute of Ion …

Newborn magnetar offers rare evidence of Einstein’s relativity in a stellar explosion

Newborn magnetar offers rare evidence of Einstein’s relativity in a stellar explosion

Published by Jenni Sidey

The light did not fade the way it was supposed to. After blazing into view about a billion light-years from Earth, the supernova known as SN 2024afav settled into something stranger. Its brightness rose, peaked, and then began to dip in a series of rhythmic bumps. Each pulse came a little faster than the one before it, like a chirp tightening in pitch. That unusual pattern has now given astronomers what they say is their clearest evidence yet that some of the universe’s brightest stellar explosions are powered by newborn magnetars, dense neutron stars with extreme magnetic fields and rapid spin rates. The results, published in Nature, also point to a role for Einstein’s general theory of relativity in shaping the light from a supernova for the first time. “The idea that magnetars are involved has seemed to have a magical aspect for theoretical astronomers,” stated Dan Kasen, a UC Berkeley physicist. “However, with this evidence, we can now conclude with certainty that there is, indeed, a relevant and substantial magnetar component. The supernova’s light …

A giant star’s sudden shift signals it might be ready to supernova

A giant star’s sudden shift signals it might be ready to supernova

Published by Jenni Sidey

WOH G64 has always been an oddball. It sits in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small galaxy that orbits the Milky Way, and it ranks among the most extreme red supergiants known. Earlier estimates put it at roughly 1,540 times the Sun’s radius. It also sheds mass at an unusually high rate and sits inside a thick, dusty environment that partly hides what is going on. Then, around 2014, the star did something rare: it changed in a way that did not bounce back. A new study led by Gonzalo Muñoz-Sanchez at the National Observatory of Athens, published in Nature Astronomy, argues that WOH G64 shifted away from its red supergiant state and into a warmer, short-lived phase that resembles a yellow hypergiant. That kind of transition matters because it can signal a star that is shedding its outer layers and edging toward the final stages of its life. WOH G64 has always been an oddball. It sits in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small galaxy that orbits the Milky Way, and it ranks among …

What a rare lensed supernova could mean for measuring cosmic expansion

What a rare lensed supernova could mean for measuring cosmic expansion

Published by Jenni Sidey

A burst of light in the deep sky is doing something it should not be able to do. It looks like one supernova, but it shows up as several copies at once, scattered around two foreground galaxies. The effect is not a telescope trick or a camera glitch. It is gravity, bending the path of the light so it reaches Earth along different routes, on different schedules. The object is SN 2025wny, nicknamed “SN Winny,” and it sits about 10 billion light-years away. It is also a superluminous supernova, a kind of stellar explosion so bright that it can still be detected from extreme distances. The team behind the work, from the Technical University of Munich (TUM), Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU), and the Max Planck Institutes for Astrophysics (MPA) and Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE), says the alignment is so unlikely that the odds of finding a similar event are below one in a million. That rarity is exactly why astronomers are excited. If they can measure the time gaps between the different images of the same …

Radio telescopes reveal the final years of a rare exploding star

Radio telescopes reveal the final years of a rare exploding star

Published by Jenni Sidey

Astronomers have discovered the first radio signals from a unique category of dying stars, called Type Ibn supernovae, and these signals offer new insights into how massive stars meet their demise. This new study provides an unprecedented level of detail about the last stages of stellar evolution. “The radio observations show us what the last ten years of a star’s life looked like, and how much it lost in mass during that time,” explains Raphael Baer-Way, a third-year PhD student studying astronomy at the University of Virginia, who led the research team working at the NSF’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array in New Mexico, along with several other radio telescopes tracking the first few months of faint radio emission from supernova SN 2023fyq. “Our observations allowed us to experience the last decade of the star’s life leading up to its explosion in real time, a true time machine,” says Baer-Way. “Because we were able to detect the radio emission from SN 2023fyq, we will be able to learn more about the dying star’s mass-loss …

Star appears to have vanished in a failed supernova

Star appears to have vanished in a failed supernova

Published by skeptic

An illustration of a failed supernova forming a black hole NASA, ESA, and P. Jeffries (STScI) A massive star in a nearby galaxy that reached the end of its life appears to have vanished rather than blown up, forming a black hole in what astronomers think is a rare way. The most common black holes in our galaxy begin as stars. When these stars explode in a supernova, they can leave behind a black hole. But it is thought that black holes can also form from stars that fail to go supernova, instead simply collapsing under their own mass and producing a black hole directly. In 2024, Kishalay De at Columbia University in New York and his colleagues observed an unusually bright star called M31-2014-DS1 in the nearby galaxy Andromeda that was around 20 times as massive as our sun. The star appeared to grow briefly brighter in 2014, before becoming dramatically dimmer between 2017 and 2020. De and his colleagues thought this pattern of brightening and then fading matched predictions for a failed supernova …

Earliest ever supernova sheds light on the first stars

Earliest ever supernova sheds light on the first stars

Published by skeptic

James Webb Space Telescope image of the galaxy cluster containing the SN Eos supernova Astronomers have caught a massive star exploding just moments after the universe emerged from the cosmic dark ages, shedding light on how the first stars were born and how they die. When stars run out of fuel and explode, they produce a burst of powerful light called a supernova. Supernovae can look extremely bright in our local universe, but the light from a star exploding in the early universe can take billions of years to reach Earth, by which time it has dimmed and become too faint to see. Because of this, astronomers can typically only see very distant supernovae in special cases, such as for type Ic supernovae, which are stellar cores that have lost their outer gas and produce an exceptionally bright burst of gamma rays. But the more typical type II supernovae, which are the most common stellar explosions we see in our galaxy and occur when a massive star runs out of fuel, are normally too faint …

NASA watched this supernova blast expand for 25 years

NASA watched this supernova blast expand for 25 years

Published by Jenni Sidey

Sign up for the Starts With a Bang newsletter Travel the universe with Dr. Ethan Siegel as he answers the biggest questions of all. Although the Universe constantly evolves, astronomers rarely see that evolution. This snippet from a structure-formation simulation, with the expansion of the Universe scaled out, represents billions of years of gravitational growth in a dark matter-rich Universe. Over time, overdense clumps of matter grow richer and more massive, growing into galaxies, groups, and clusters of galaxies, while the less dense regions than average preferentially give up their matter to the denser surrounding areas. The “void” regions between the bound structures continue to expand, but the structures themselves, once they become bound in any fashion, do not. Credit: Ralf Kaehler and Tom Abel (KIPAC)/Oliver Hahn Instead, we get snapshots: stars and galaxies that barely change over human timescales. Imaged here in 9 different wavelength filters (from 0.9 to 4.8 microns) for a total of 120 hours, this JWST view of Abell S1063 is one of the most massive clusters ever imaged with deep …