11 billion year old supernova

Researchers at the University of California, Irvine have discovered evidence of a supernova that occurred in the early universe, almost twice as old as the oldest known supernova.

In this picture, the artist conveys to us his impression of the death of one of the first stars in the universe. Nearly 11 billion years ago, this sun, about 100 times more massive than our own, pushed and ejected most of its material into space, collapsed and then exploded in a massive explosion called a supernova. A super nova is a phenomenon in which a massive star explodes because the pressure created by the outward nuclear fusion is not enough to balance the tremendous inward pull of its own gravity. The supernova is the final stage in the evolution of that star. When a star runs out of nuclear fuel (meaning elements that can fuse into heavier elements releasing energy), there is no force to resist the pull of its own gravity and the star collapses in on itself. Then its core rapidly compresses, heats up extremely and explodes from the enormous pressure created. When the explosion collided with stellar material, the collision ignited the star's entire galaxy. Despite the massive explosion, the galaxy is so far away from us that astronomers had to sift through years of dim telescopic images to find this moment. Analysis of the light, as the researchers report in the journal Nature in July 2009, reveals the explosion as a rare type of supernova (type IIn) and provides a glimpse of stellar evolution at a very young stage of the universe. A type II supernova occurs when the star's nuclear fuel runs out and it collapses under itself. "When stars explode they spit material into space. Eventually, gravity causes the material to collapse into a new star, around which planets like Earth may develop," says Jeff Cook, a postdoctoral fellow in physics and astronomy at the University of California, Irving. The oldest known large supernova occurred 6 billion years ago. Cook and his colleagues from the Center for Cosmology at the University of California, Irvine last year discovered a galaxy cluster in the early stages of development 11.4 billion light-years away, the farthest of its kind ever discovered. The protocluster has been named LBG-2377 and it provides cosmologists with extraordinary insight into the process of galaxy formation and the evolution of the universe. Supernova on Wikipedia For information on the university website