Scientific American June 2016
Every year thousands of exploding stars appear in a bizarre variety of shapes. Astronomers want to know why they are booming
Around every second, somewhere in our observable universe, another sun is destroyed in a star catastrophe – when a star pulsates, collides, collapses into a black hole or explodes as a supernova. This dynamic side of the universe, lost in the apparent calm of the night sky, has recently come to the fore in astronomical research. For almost a century, scientists have tried to understand what happened in billions of years of cosmic evolution, but it is only recently that we have begun analyzing celestial events on time scales of days and hours to witness the volatile life and death of stars.
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