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Thursday December 3, 2009
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 Astronomers have discovered a new kind of cosmic explosion that seems to have originated from an exceptionally massive star--one that's over 200 times the size of our own sun, according to Space.com.
Scientists first discovered SN2007bi, the supernova in question, in 2007, and were immediately perplexed. It finally faded just recently. "It was much brighter, and it was bright for a very long time," said researcher Paolo Mazzali, of the Max-Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Germany, in the report. "We could observe this thing almost two years after it was discovered, where you normally don't see anything anymore."
The resultant explosion was about 50 to 100 times brighter than a typical supernova--and rewrites what astronomers knew about star formation. 2N2007bi has turned out to be a pair-instability supernova, which releases protons so energetic that they create pairs of electrons and their anti-matter opposites, positrons, the report said. The two meet, annihilate each other, and cause the star itself to collapse, "igniting its oxygen core in a runaway nuclear explosion that eats up the whole star." Sounds delicious. (Image credit: NASA/illustration)
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December 3, 2009 5:42 PM
Holy CRAP that's intense. I spent a good amount of time on high-energy astrophysics in college and while I understood the math around something like this I didn't think it was possible to produce the volume of energy required to make it happen.
This must be really exciting for astrophysicists right now though - they're seeing phenomena that we kind of understand but never thought we'd observe.