27 Sep, 2017

Monday night nearly 20 Utah men and women were transported to a site millions of light-years away, where they stared in awe at a vast galaxy hanging in dark space. Several other galaxies, small puffy white splotches, spread out to the left of the largest, while hundreds of stars glared in the foreground. Members of the Salt Lake Astronomical Society were participating in the group’s first attempt to use the University of Utah’s Willard L. Eccles Observatory with its amazing 32-inch-diameter

27 Jul, 2017

The Fireworks Galaxy, scientific designation NGC 6946, has that nickname for a good reason: more supernovas have popped off there than in any other known island universe. Counting the latest, the supernova discovered by Patrick Wiggins at 8:28 p.m. May 13, a total of 10 of these largest known explosions have occurred in the galaxy since 1917. The runner-up is the galaxy M-61, a large example in the Virgo Cluster, which has generated seven since 1926. An ordinary galaxy like ours, which is at

17 May, 2017

On Saturday night my friend Patrick Wiggins discovered his third supernova, and this one’s a treasure. It is a Type II supernova in the famous Fireworks Galaxy. Let's define the term. A supernova is the catastrophic death explosion of a star, the largest blast known since the Big Bang. *** A Type I supernova happens when a white dwarf star sucks material away from a nearby star that is locked to it by gravity in a binary arrangement. Its mass grows so great that it blows up. *** A Type II