BBC Knowledge Asia Edition 3

EXPLODING STAR SHOCKWAVE

CAPTURED FOR THE FIRST TIME

When some stars die, they go out with a bang. When the internal furnace of a

star many times more massive than the Sun runs out, the force of gravity can

take over causing the core to suddenly collapse. This results in the release of

enormous amounts of energy in a massive supernova explosion. It can also

trigger a gigantic shockwave called a ‘shock breakout’.

Now, this shockwave has been captured for the first time in visible light by

NASA’s Kepler telescope. An international team led by the University of Notre

Dame’s Peter Garnavich observed the supernova KSN 2011d, a massive star

more than 500 times the mass of the Sun, as it exploded 1.2 billion light-years

away from Earth. The event was found among three years of observational

data and only lasted for around 20 minutes.

“In order to see something that happens on timescales of minutes, like a

shock breakout, you want to have a camera continuously monitoring the sky,”

said Garnavich. “You don’t know when a supernova is going to go off, and

Kepler’s vigilance allowed us to be a witness as the explosion began.”

As well as teaching us more about the life cycles of stars, studying these

violent events could help us to understand how complex chemicals and even

life itself came to be, the researchers said.

“I might be a

unicorn, but I’m

not mythical,

promise!”

PHOTOS: NASA, ALAMY

What’s that? Something to keep

your trousers up?

Nope. It’s the Siberian Unicorn.

Pull the other one. April Fool’s

Day was ages ago.

No, really. It was a large, shaggy

mammal with a pointy horn sitting

on the front of its snout. It was

previously believed to have died

out 350,000 years ago but a skull

recently found in Kazakhstan dates

to just 29,000 years ago.

I want one!

Erm, I don’t think you do. Quite

apart from the fact that they are

now extinct, the animals were

around two metres tall, four

metres long and weighed about

four tonnes, making them similar

in size to a mammoth. Not exactly

the sort of thing you could keep in

your garden.

THE DOWNLOAD

Computer-generated

timelapse of the

supernova explosion

of a

can

se of

lso

t by

Notre

star

years

al

a

sky,”

d

se

even

“I might be a

unicorn, but I’m

not mythical,

promise!”

PH

O

T

OS

: NASA

, ALAMY

your garden.

SPACE

ELASMOTHERIUM

SIBIRICUM

Update

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