News From the Field
Possible New Class of Supernovae Puts Calcium in Your Bones

May 19, 2010

University of California, Berkeley, astronomers have discovered several examples of an unusual type of exploding star that may be a new class of supernovae spewing calcium into the galaxy, which eventually ends up in all of us. A team from the Weizmann Institute joined Alex Filippenko and his colleagues to study one supernova detected in 2005, and concluded that it resulted from the thermonuclear explosion of a helium layer on a low-mass white dwarf. Full Story

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University of California, Berkeley

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