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Thursday, October 28, 2010

Photo: "Brightest Supernova" Reveals New Kind of Star Death


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A distant supernova dubbed SN 2006gy ejects massive amounts of material into space in this artist's illustration. The event—the brightest supernova ever seen—was imaged near the nucleus of its galaxy by the ground-based Lick Observatory in California (bottom left) and the space-based Chandra X-ray Observatory (bottom right).

Illustration: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss; X-ray: NASA/CXC/UC Berkeley/N.Smith et al.; IR: Lick/UC Berkeley/J.Bloom & C.Hansen