Massive stars end their lives with energetic explosions known as supernovae. Stripped-envelope supernovae show weak or no traces of hydrogen in their ejecta, meaning that the star loses most or all of its hydrogen-rich outer layers before exploding. Source: https://phys.org/news/2020-10-revealing-lonely-cassiopeia-famous-supernova.html…
Tag: massive stars
Search for ETs among 10 million stars comes up empty
Astronomers used a radio telescope in Australia to search for artificial radio signals among 10 million stars. The search came up empty. But, they say, that’s not bad news for those hoping to find intelligent extraterrestrials. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/search-for-extraterrestrial-intelligence-10-million-stars…
METISSE offers new insights into the lives of massive stars
Massive stars are those larger than about 10 times the mass of the sun and are born far less often than their low-mass counterparts. However, they contribute the most to the evolution of star clusters and galaxies. Massive stars are the precursors of many vivid and energetic phenomena in the universe, including enriching their surroundings in supernova explosions and altering the…
NGC 6357: Cathedral to Massive Stars
How massive can a normal star be? Source: https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html…
LIGO and Virgo find a mystery object in the “mass gap”
The science world is buzzing today about a new discovery made via the LIGO-Virgo collaboration. It’s a new object found in the so-called “mass gap” between neutron stars and black holes. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/gw190814-mystery-object-in-mass-gap…
Either the heaviest-known neutron star or the lightest-known black hole: LIGO-Virgo finds mystery object in ‘mass gap’
When the most massive stars die, they collapse under their own gravity and leave behind black holes; when stars that are a bit less massive die, they explode in a supernova and leave behind dense, dead remnants of stars called neutron stars. For decades, astronomers have been puzzled by a gap that lies between neutron stars and black holes: the heaviest…
Dancing stars and black holes in a cosmic cloud of gas: New research of the ‘common envelope phase’
Most massive stars are born in binaries (and sometimes triples, quadruples, and so on). As stars age, they grow larger in size by a hundred-fold or even thousand-fold expansion. When stars in binaries expand, parts of them approach the other star in the binary, whose gravity can then pull off the outer portions of the expanding star. The result is mass…
Scientists reveal new insights of exploding massive stars and future gravitational wave detectors
In a study recently published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Dr. Jade Powell and Dr. Bernhard Mueller from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav) simulated three core-collapse supernovae using supercomputers from across Australia, including the OzSTAR supercomputer at Swinburne University of Technology. The simulation models—which are 39 times, 20 times and 18 times…
Clearing up a supermassive (black hole) confusion
Black holes are among the most enigmatic objects in our universe. These mysterious celestial bodies do not emit any light of their own and are thus incredibly difficult to spot. In fact, one can only detect black holes based on the effects that they have on their surroundings. Black-holes come in various flavors and sizes, from ‘small’ stellar-mass black holes to…
World’s first 3-D simulations of superluminous supernovae
For most of the 20th century, astronomers have scoured the skies for supernovae—the explosive deaths of massive stars—and their remnants in search of clues about the progenitor, the mechanisms that caused it to explode, and the heavy elements created in the process. In fact, these events create most of the cosmic elements that go on to form new stars, galaxies, and…