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Explanation: The hydrogen in your body, present in every molecule of water, came from the Big Bang. There are no other appreciable sources of hydrogen in the universe. The carbon in your body was made by nuclear fusion in the interior of stars, as was the oxygen. Much of the iron in your body was made during supernovas of stars that occurred long ago and far away. The gold in your jewelry was likely made from neutron stars during collisions that may have been visible as short-duration gamma-ray bursts or gravitational wave events. Elements like phosphorus and copper are present...

For years, experts thought the biggest stars in the universe, red supergiants, died with a whimper. But in 2020, astronomers witnessed quite the opposite. One of these gleaming monsters -- 10 times more massive than the sun -- violently self-destructed after presenting the cosmos with a final, radiant beacon of starlight. ..Jacobson-Galán is the lead author of a paper published Thursday in The Astrophysical Journal that documents the star's eruption as well as its last, 130-day hurrah.... ...The star's extreme illumination indicated it wasn't dormant, or quiescent, as previously observed red supergiants had been prior to their demise. This shiny...

CalTech astronomer Fritz Zwicky was the first to conceive of dark matter, supernovas and neutron stars. He also had a theory about colonizing the solar system using nuclear bombs. We could terraform other planets, he argued, by pulverizing them and then moving them closer or further from the sun. ...

Enlarge Image Ray maker. The "Jellyfish nebula" (IC 443) and another supernova remnant gave researchers firm evidence that cosmic rays come from exploding stars. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA For the past century, physicists have puzzled over cosmic rays, particles (mostly protons) that hurtle through space at high speed and seem to come from all directions equally. What's the source of these galactic projectiles? And how do they come to be traveling so fast? Today, an international team announced a major step toward answering those questions: conclusive evidence that at least some of the cosmic rays come from supernova remnants—expanding shells of...

Few people doubt there is intelligent alien life in the Milky Way galaxy, but where can we expect to find it? Astronomers think that the inner sector of the Milky Way Galaxy may be the most likely to support habitable worlds. Unfortunately some of these places are also most dangerous to all life-forms. According to Michael Gowanlock of NASA's Astrobiology Institute, and his Trent University colleagues David Patton and Sabine McConnel, habitability in the Milky Way can be based on three factors: supernova rates, metallicity (the abundance of heavy elements, used as a proxy for planet formation) and the time...

Galaxy Arp 220, located 250 million light-years from Earth, is home to seven different supernova explosions all going on at the same time. We've never seen so many stars exploding simultaneously in the same galaxy. A team of astronomers at Chalmers and Onsala Space Observatory found that all seven supernovas went off in the last sixty years (allowing for the 250 million years for the light to reach Earth, of course). In cosmic terms, that's pretty much no time at all, as European Southern Observatory astronomer Rodrigo Parra explains: "In Arp 220, we see far more supernovae than in our...

CHICAGO (AFP) – Astronomers who have long used supernovas as cosmic mile markers to help measure the expansion of the universe now have an answer to the nagging question of what sparks the massive stellar explosions. "These are such critical objects in understanding the universe," lead author Marat Gilfanov of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Germany said Wednesday in describing his team's study. "It was a major embarrassment that we did not know how they worked. Now we are beginning to understand what lights the fuse of these explosions." Most scientists say Type 1a supernovae are formed when...

ST. LOUIS — Quark stars, exotic objects that have yet to be directly observed, are part of a new theory to explain some of the brightest stellar explosions recorded in the universe. Super-luminous supernovae, which produce more than 100 times more light energy than normal supernovae and occur in about one out of every 1,000 supernovae explosions, have long baffled astrophysicists. The problem has been finding a source for all of that extra energy. University of Calgary astrophysicists Denis Leahy and Rachid Ouyed think they have a possible source — the explosive conversion of a neutron star into a quark...

NEW YORK - The Hubble Space Telescope has shown that a mysterious form of energy first conceived by Albert Einstein, then rejected by the famous physicist as his "greatest blunder," appears to have been fueling the expansion of the universe for most of its history. This so-called "dark energy" has been pushing the universe outward for at least 9 billion years, astronomers said Thursday. "This is the first time we have significant, discrete data from back then," said Adam Riess, a professor of astronomy at Johns Hopkins University and researcher at NASA's Space Telescope Science Institute. He and several colleagues...