The findings will appear in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and the preprint is available online:Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory
Standard-Candle Supernovae are Still Standard, but Why?
The Nearby Supernova Factory based at Berkeley Lab shows that Type Ia supernovae have a surprisingly large range of masses
...Until recently, scientists thought they knew why Type Ia supernovae are all so much alike. But their favorite scenario was wrong. ...
Read all about it at:
http://newscenter.lbl.gov/news-releases ... upernovae/
http://arxiv-web3.library.cornell.edu/abs/1402.6842
Type Ia supernova bolometric light curves and ejected mass estimates from the Nearby Supernova Factory
R. Scalzo et al
CAASTRO:
http://www.caastro.org/news/2014-snfactory
Critical Mass not needed for supernova explosions
The findings, from an international team from the Nearby Supernova Factory project, overturn previous understanding of white dwarf stars and raises new questions about how these stars explode.
"White dwarfs are dead stars, the corpses of stars that were once like our Sun. They won't explode on their own - they need another star to help blow them up," said CAASTRO Affiliate Dr Richard Scalzo, who led the latest research.
"We now know it's much easier to blow them up than we used to think." ...