A star goes bang
A supernova 21 million light years away has offered a rare glimpse of how of exploding stars can breathe life into the universe.
Scientists captured images of the titanic blast just 11 hours after the explosion in an outer spiral arm of the Pinwheel Galaxy in the Great Bear constellation.
Three powerful Earth-based telescopes and the American space agency Nasa's Swift orbital observatory were used to study the event, dubbed SN2011fe.
The results produced a wealth of data, showing in unprecedented detail how heavier elements such as oxygen and iron were flung out of the expanding fireball.
In time, these elements will become building blocks of new solar systems and possibly their living inhabitants.
The observations also provided important clues to how this class of stella explosion, known as a Type 1a supernova, occurs.
Type 1a supernovae are important because they always produce the same amount of light. This has allowed astronomers to use them as "cosmic candles" to determine the size and rate of expansion of the universe.
From their brightness or dimness, astronomers can work out how far away Type 1 supernovae are, as well as the patch of universe around them.
But precisely how the explosions occur has long been an unsolved mystery.
Professor Shri Kulkarni, from the California Institute of Technology, US, one of the authors of the research published today in the journal Nature, said: "What caused these explosions has divided the astronomical community deeply. SN2011fe is like the Rosetta Stone of Type 1a supernovae."
British colleague Dr Mark Sullivan, from Oxford University, said: "Understanding how these giant explosions create and mix materials is important because supernovae are where we get most of the elements that make up the Earth and even our own bodies - for instance, these supernovae are a major source of iron in the universe. So we are all made of bits of exploding stars."
The scientists were able to calculate the actual moment of the explosion to within 20 minutes.
Dr Peter Nugent, from the US Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, first spotted the supernova's signal in August while scouring data from an automated telescope on Mount Palomar, California,
He said: "Our early observations confirmed some assumptions about the physics of Type 1a supernovae, and we ruled out a number of possible models. But with this close-up look, we also found things nobody had dreamed of."
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Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.
