National Science Foundation - Where Discoveries Begin

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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