Sentences with phrase «before exploding as supernovae»

Cassiopeia A Just before it explodes as a supernova, a massive star is like an onion, with layers of different chemical compositions atop one another.

If a runaway star accumulates between 800 and 3000 times the Sun's mass before exploding as a supernova, it can produce a midsize black hole whose mass is 100 to 1000 times the Sun's.

Not exact matches

When a star explodes as a supernova, it shines brightly for a few weeks or months before fading away.

Depending on its chemistry, the star might then explode as an exceptionally bright supernova or collapse into a smaller, faster - spinning millisecond pulsar, an event that has not been witnessed before (arxiv.org/abs/1302.4634).

These stars are rapidly working their way through their vast supplies of hydrogen, and have only a few million years of life left before they meet a dramatic demise and explode as supernovae.

But with a neutrino detector now being built within a Japanese mountain that could come online as early as 2016, researchers might be able to do something as yet undone: Make detailed observations of a supernova in our galaxy before it visibly explodes.

Before 1987, astronomers believed that only red supergiants would explode as supernovae, but this observation proved that other types of evolved stars can produce these explosions too.

Some of the most massive stars have lifetimes of less than a few million years before they exhaust their nuclear fuel and explode as supernovae.