Are there thousands of Godzillas hiding in plain sight?
A unique galaxy suggests a novel method to search for rare stars, which may have been previously overlooked and misidentified.
A unique galaxy suggests a novel method to search for rare stars, which may have been previously overlooked and misidentified.
Where does the dust in the universe come from? Today’s bite explains that luminous blue variables, a rare type of evolved massive star, may be the second most important producer of dust in galaxies.
Many massive stars die as supernovae, although connection between a star’s life and it’s death is unclear. Today’s paper uses statistical distributions of massive stars and supernovae to link together both ends of the story.
When the supernova impostor SN2009ip brightened to a V-band absolute magnitude of -17.7 near the end of 2012, the outburst was classified as a Type IIn supernova and many observers thought the star had finally exploded for good. In this paper, however, the authors present several months of multiband imaging of transient 2012b and argue that the low limit on the nickel mass and lack of most heavy elements in the ejecta suggest the progenitor is still around, and that transient 2012b was produced instead by the collision of two massive shells, possibly ejected by the pulsational pair instability.