Post by Steve Gardner on May 22, 2008 9:35:56 GMT
Source: Nature
When stars explode, they generally do it so quickly that astronomers only spy the remnants of the event. But in a rare stroke of luck, a satellite has caught the X-ray burst of a dying star as the event actually unfolded.
The finding, which appears in today's issue of Nature 1, confirms a decades-old theory that suggests such X-ray signals would occur as a result of supernovae. It also suggests that future missions will see many more stars in the act of exploding.
A star lives its life in a balancing act: gravity crushes its gas, while the energy of nuclear fusion pushes it back outward. But when a star runs out of fuel, gravity wins, and the star suddenly and catastrophically collapses. In massive stars, the rebound from that rapid compression is a massive explosion — a supernova.
When stars explode, they generally do it so quickly that astronomers only spy the remnants of the event. But in a rare stroke of luck, a satellite has caught the X-ray burst of a dying star as the event actually unfolded.
The finding, which appears in today's issue of Nature 1, confirms a decades-old theory that suggests such X-ray signals would occur as a result of supernovae. It also suggests that future missions will see many more stars in the act of exploding.
A star lives its life in a balancing act: gravity crushes its gas, while the energy of nuclear fusion pushes it back outward. But when a star runs out of fuel, gravity wins, and the star suddenly and catastrophically collapses. In massive stars, the rebound from that rapid compression is a massive explosion — a supernova.
