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