{"id":124372,"date":"2021-06-28T11:23:15","date_gmt":"2021-06-28T18:23:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/06\/discovery-of-a-new-type-of-stellar-explosion-an-electron-capture-supernova-illuminates-a-medieval-mystery"},"modified":"2021-06-28T11:23:15","modified_gmt":"2021-06-28T18:23:15","slug":"discovery-of-a-new-type-of-stellar-explosion-an-electron-capture-supernova-illuminates-a-medieval-mystery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/06\/discovery-of-a-new-type-of-stellar-explosion-an-electron-capture-supernova-illuminates-a-medieval-mystery","title":{"rendered":"Discovery of a New Type of Stellar Explosion \u2013 An Electron-Capture Supernova \u2013 Illuminates a Medieval Mystery"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/discovery-of-a-new-type-of-stellar-explosion-an-electron-capture-supernova-illuminates-a-medieval-mystery.gif\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p><strong>A team led by astronomers at UC Santa Barbara have confirmed the existence of an elusive new type of supernova.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>A worldwide team led by UC Santa Barbara scientists at Las Cumbres Observatory has discovered the first convincing evidence for a new type of stellar explosion \u2014 an electron-capture supernova. While they have been theorized for 40 years, real-world examples have been elusive. They are thought to arise from the explosions of massive super-asymptotic giant branch (SAGB) stars, for which there has also been scant evidence. The discovery, published in <em>Nature Astronomy<\/em>, also sheds new light on the thousand-year mystery of the supernova from A.D. 1054 that was visible all over the world in the daytime, before eventually becoming the Crab Nebula.<\/p>\n<p>Historically, supernovae have fallen into two main types: thermonuclear and iron-core collapse. A thermonuclear supernova is the explosion of a white dwarf star after it gains matter in a binary star system. These white dwarfs are the dense cores of ash that remain after a low-mass star (one up to about 8 times the mass of the sun) reaches the end of its life. An iron core-collapse supernova occurs when a massive star \u2014 one more than about 10 times the mass of the sun \u2014 runs out of nuclear fuel and its iron core collapses, creating a black hole or neutron star. Between these two main types of supernovae are electron-capture supernovae. These stars stop fusion when their cores are made of oxygen, neon and magnesium; they aren\u2019t massive enough to create iron.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A team led by astronomers at UC Santa Barbara have confirmed the existence of an elusive new type of supernova. A worldwide team led by UC Santa Barbara scientists at Las Cumbres Observatory has discovered the first convincing evidence for a new type of stellar explosion \u2014 an electron-capture supernova. While they have been theorized [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-124372","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124372","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=124372"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124372\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=124372"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=124372"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=124372"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}