Astronomers locate a supernova
2008-05-22 15:13:02 (GMT) (Caymanmama.com - Top Stories News)Washington (CaymanMama.com) — CNN reported that on January 9, 2008, astronomers spotted a star in space which was going through its dying phase. Alex Filippenko, an astronomy professor at the University of California said that less than 1% of all stars explode into a supernova. Most of the stars, like our sun, get stronger with time and slowly fade into white dwarfs producing very little energy.
According to Stan Woosley, an astrophysicist at the University of California, said that the view of the supernova confirms the theories of stars exploding and dying and the event is not that surprising. It is a co-incident that the telescopes reached the exact point where the star was going to explode. The NGC2770 galaxy is at a distance of around 100 million light years from Milky Way (1 light year = 5.9 trillion miles).
The star which exploded was just around 10 million years of age. Its diameter is almost the same as our sun but it is 10-20 times denser than that. Robert Kirshner, an astronomy professor at Harvard University, said that big stars usually live at a fast rate and they die pretty young. There were various stages involved in this star’s death, its core got heavier with consecutive nuclear reactions taking place and the atomic particles shedding out towards the outer space.
The life of the star began with hydrogen getting converted into helium and this helium getting converting into carbon and oxygen and further into heavier elements till the time it gets converted into iron. This is the time when the core of the star became so heavy that it collapsed on itself.
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