PARIS (AFP) – Astronomers on Wednesday said they had found the farthest supernova ever detected, a giant star that ripped apart around 11 billion years ago.
A new technique enabled the cosmologists to make the find, which should help advance knowledge into these rare phenomena and their role in generating other stars, they said in a report published by the British journal Nature.
A supernova occurs when a massive star runs out of fuel, collapses in upon itself under the force of its own gravity to become a tiny, ultra-dense object called a neutron star.
The star then explodes, sending out a shock wave that reverberates around the galaxy.
The blast distributes elements that are heavier than oxygen, such as iron, calcium and silicon, and enriches the molecular clouds that over the aeons cluster together and form new star systems.
The ancient supernova was found after astronomers compared several years of images taken from a portion of the sky, enabling them to look for objects that changed in brightness over time.
The universe is believed to be 13.7 billion years old, so the supernova marks the death of one of earliest stars in creation.
The previous supernova record was an event that happened around six billion years ago.
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
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