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Supernovae

New explosions of old stars?

Nature volume 465, pages 303–304 (2010)Cite this article

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Examples of stellar explosions have emerged that fall outside the traditional types of supernova. The nature of the stars that produce them and the mechanism by which they explode is far from clear.

How many ways can stars explode? At the most fundamental level, possibly just two: ejection of matter following the gravitational collapse of the core of a massive star, and thermonuclear disruption of a white-dwarf star. Because the two mechanisms could hardly be more distinct, we might expect that observations of a supernova would reveal which way the star exploded. For most supernovae this does seem to be the case. However, on page 326 of this issue, Kawabata et al.1 favour the core-collapse origin for an unusual supernova, whereas Perets et al.2 (page 322) support the hypothesis of partial explosions of white dwarfs for a recently recognized class of similar events.

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Figure 1: Supernova-ejected mass versus absolute magnitude.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. David Branch is in the Homer L. Dodge Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma 73019, USA. branch@nhn.ou.edu,

    David Branch

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Branch, D. New explosions of old stars?. Nature 465, 303–304 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/465303a

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