Wednesday, May 21, 2008

A Star Explodes

Credit: NASA/Swift Science Team/Stefan Immler


"While peering at her computer screen four months ago, astronomer Alicia Soderberg expected to see the small glowing smudge of a month-old supernova. But what she and her colleague saw instead was a strange, extremely bright, five-minute burst of X-rays.


With that observation, they became the first astronomers to catch a star in the act of exploding.


"For years we have dreamed of seeing a star just as it was exploding, but actually finding one is a once-in-a-lifetime, event," said Soderberg, a Hubble and Carnegie Princeton Fellow at Princeton University."