Supernova scrutiny: Astronomers look inside the heart of a dying star for the first time - News - Gadgets & Tech - The Independent

Supernova scrutiny: Astronomers look inside the heart of a dying star for the first time - News - Gadgets & Tech - The Independent:

For the first time ever astronomers have been able to look inside the heart of an exploding star, using a space telescope to peer into the radioactive corpse of Cassiopeia A, a star that was once eight times the size of the Sun.

“This has been a holy grail observation for high energy astrophysics for decades,” said Steven Boggs, chair of physics at UC Berkeley and co-author of the paper published in the journal Nature.

“For the first time we are able to image the radioactive emission in a supernova remnant, which lets us probe the fundamental physics of the nuclear explosion at the heart of the supernova like we have never been able to do before.”

Supernovae are a key mechanism in the formation of the Universe as we know it, creating a wide array of ‘heavy’ elements via nucleosynthesis and ejecting this matter deep into the cosmos. In fact, the shock waves from supernovae can even trigger the formation of new stars – making these explosions part of the Universe’s most awe-inspiring ‘life cycle’.

  

A
false colour image of Cassiopeia A creating using data from the Spitzer
and Hubble Space Telescopes and the Chandra X-Ray observatory