Brightest supernova in decades serves up cosmic clues for astronomers
http://dervishcom.blogspot.com/2011/09/brightest-supernova-in-decades-serves.html
Twenty-one million years ago in the Pinwheel Galaxy — an elegant, spiral-armed neighbor of our Milky Way — an old, dim star had a very bad day. It exploded and began to blaze like a billion suns.
On Aug. 24, Peter Nugent had a very good day. The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory astrophysicist was about to grab lunch when he checked to see if a robotic telescope had spied anything of interest the night before. Bingo. Boom. Supernova.
And not just any supernova. Every night, astronomers spot several exploding stars across the universe. But this one was so close — in cosmic terms — and seen so soon after its light reached Earth that astronomers are calling it the supernova of a generation.
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Source: http://feeds.washingtonpost.com/click.phdo?i=8e1c07f8a6d3e75318fea50d9a30b22d
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