Astronomers see death throes of stars from 11 billion years ago, spotting oldest supernovae

September 4th, 2009 PARIS - The ESA's (European Space agency's) XMM-Newton orbiting X-ray telescope has uncovered a celestial Rosetta stone, in the form of the first close-up of a white dwarf star, circling a companion star, that could explode into a particular kind of supernova in a few million years. These supernovae are used as beacons to measure cosmic distances and ultimately understand the expansion of our Universe.

August 25th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Astronomers, using astronomical data from the University of Arizona's Catalina Sky Survey, have found more than 700 unique "optical transients," or objects that change brightness on time scales of minutes to years, as well as 177 supernovae. Their discoveries include the most energetic supernova ever seen, and a nearby stellar explosion in the Antennae galaxy that is helping astronomers refine the cosmic distance scale.

August 13th, 2009 WASHINGTON - A new study has determined that type 1a supernovae will have to be taken into account if astronomers are to use them for more precise measurements of cosmic distances and dark energy that is accelerating the expansion of the universe. The discovery of dark energy, a mysterious force that is accelerating the expansion of the universe, was based on observations of type 1a supernovae.

August 6th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Looking almost 11 billion years into the past, astronomers have measured the motions of stars for the first time in a very distant galaxy and clocked speeds upwards of one million miles per hour, about twice the speed of our Sun through the Milky Way. The fast-moving stars shed new light on how these distant galaxies, which are a fraction the size of our Milky Way, may have evolved into the full-grown galaxies seen around us today.

July 28th, 2009 WASHINGTON - A team of astronomers has discovered a group of rare galaxies called the "Green Peas", which could lend unique insights into how galaxies form stars in the early universe. The galaxies were discovered with the help of citizen scientists working through an online project called Galaxy Zoo.

July 9th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Cosmologists at UC (University of California) Irvine have found two supernovae farther away than any previously detected by using a new technique that could help find other dying stars at the edge of the universe, which could shed light on universe formation 11 billion years ago. This method has the potential to allow astronomers to study some of the very first supernovae and will advance the understanding of how galaxies form, how they change over time and how Earth came to be.

July 2nd, 2009 WASHINGTON - Two University of Hawaii astronomers have found a binary star-disk system in which each star is surrounded by the kind of dust disk that is frequently the precursor of a planetary system, which makes them solar systems in the making. The astronomers in question are doctoral student Rita Mann and Dr.

July 2nd, 2009 LONDON - An international team of astronomers has discovered a new class of black hole, more than 500 times the mass of the Sun. Astronomers made the finding in a distant galaxy approximately 290 million light years from Earth.

June 16th, 2009 WASHINGTON - An innovative sky survey has begun returning images that will be used to detect unprecedented numbers of powerful cosmic explosions called supernovae in distant galaxies, variable brightness stars in our own Milky Way, and reveal new classes of astronomical objects. All of these discoveries will stem from the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) survey, which combines, in a new way, the power of a wide-field telescope, a high-resolution camera, and high-performance networking and computing, with rapid follow-up by telescopes around the globe, to open windows of discovery for astronomers.

June 10th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Astronomers from Queen's University Belfast have proposed a new physical interpretation of a supernova discovered on 7th November 2008. A group of researchers, led by Dr.

June 5th, 2009 MUNICH - Astronomers have found that a stellar family near a supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way, is surprisingly normal. Using ESO's Very Large Telescope, astronomers have obtained one of the sharpest views ever of the Arches Cluster - an extraordinary dense cluster of young stars near the supermassive black hole.

June 2nd, 2009 WASHINGTON - A new research by astrophysicists at the University of Warwick, UK, has discovered that a mystery stellar explosion recorded in 2006 may have marked the unusual death of an equally unusually carbon-rich star. The strange object, known as SCP 06F6, was first noted in 2006 by supernovae researchers in the US taking images with the Hubble Space Telescope, seeing it appearing out of nowhere, and fading again into oblivion, over the course of 120 days.

April 28th, 2009 Astronomers see oldest object in universe yetWASHINGTON — Astronomers have spotted a burst of energy from a dying star, setting a record for the oldest and most distant object seen by Earth yet. The 10-second blast was from when the universe was only 630 million years old.

March 21st, 2009 WASHINGTON - A team of scientists has confirmed the origin of supernovae as being produced from dying red supergiant stars. The scientists are from the Dark Cosmology Centre at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen and from Queens University, Belfast.

February 6th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Space dust interferes with the observation of distant stars and annoys astronomers just as much as the household variety does. 'We not only do not know what the stuff is, but we do not know where it is made or how it gets into space,' said Donald York, professor in astronomy at the University of Chicago.