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  • AI Helps Astronomers Discover a New Type of Supernova

    Astronomers have discovered what may be a massive star exploding while trying to swallow a black hole, offering an explanation for one of the strangest supernovae ever seen.

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  • The Eye of Sauron: CfA Astronomers Play Key Role in Cosmic Discovery, Solving a Long-Standing Blazar Mystery

    A stunning new image of a cosmic jet aimed directly at Earth, resembling the mythical “Eye of Sauron” in the distant Universe, has revealed the secret behind unexpectedly bright high-energy gamma-ray and neutrino emissions from a peculiar blazar, potentially solving a decade-long cosmic puzzle.

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  • Chandra X-Ray Observatory Captures Breathtaking New Images

    The images feature data from the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory along with a host of other NASA telescopes including the James Webb Space Telescope, Hubble Space Telescope and more.

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Neutron Stars and White Dwarfs

When stars die, their fate is determined by how massive they were in life. Stars like our Sun leave behind white dwarfs: Earth-size remnants of the original star’s core. More massive stars explode as supernovas, while their cores collapse into neutron stars: ultra-dense, fast-spinning spheres made of the same ingredients as the nucleus of an atom. At least some neutron stars are pulsars, which produce powerful beams of light, which as they sweep across our view from Earth look like extremely regular flashes.

Small as they are, the deaths of these compact objects change the chemistry of the universe. The supernova explosions of white dwarfs and the collisions of neutron stars create new elements on the periodic table. For all these reasons, white dwarfs and neutron stars are important laboratories for physics at the extremes of strong gravity, density, and temperature.

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