Don't you love it when things go boom? So would some astronomers, it would seem, as a recent entry in the latest issue of The Astrophysical Journal reflected much of their excitement. You see, a supernova went nuclear some 1,600 centuries ago in a collection of nebulae called the Large Magellanic Cloud, but even now the after effects of the collapse was readily observed. How is that possible? Prepare for another crash lesson on physics and time at the full story.

A star nine times the size of our own Sun has been observed speeding away from our Milky Way at 1.6 million miles per hour. While this may not be an unusual event in and of itself (stranger stuff have happened in the universe - game delays for instance), scientists have been puzzled by the star's origins since it didn't come from our own galaxy. Now they believe that the star came from another galaxy, catapulted away by a black hole 1,000 times the mass of the Sun. Details in the full article.

While studying the remnants of a supernova in the "nearby" Small Magellanic Cloud, a team of scientists at UC Berkeley made an odd discovery: the amount of interstellar dust was only a small fraction of what it should have been.

Supernovae - exploding stars - have long been thought to be the source of most of the interstellar dust in the universe. New observations with the latest equipment is showing this may not necessarily be true. As astrophysicist Snezana Stanimirovic notes, "observations of supernova remnants in the Milky Way show much less dust than expected."

What gives?

According to studies by Ben Sugerman of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore,  it may be the result of some mistaken assumptions. Earlier scientists had assumed that supernova dust spreads uniformly, "like a big, spherical, hot bubble." The reality is that the dust may actually spread in a fashion that is "very clumpy." Doug Welch of McMaster University also points out that supernova dust quickly cools in outer space - and cold dust is not observable by infrared telescopes. This fact may account for the "apparent dust deficit" in earlier observations.

However, Stanimirovic points out that "a lot of dust grains get destroyed as the blast wave propagates." Dust grains grind against each until they're small to detect.

Radio astronomers have provided us a clearer picture of our galaxy after gathering data from a galaxy-wide survey of hydrogen gas clouds present in the Milky Way. They have found that this galaxy isn't a clean, symmetrical spiral, instead, it has extra long arms on one side while the other side is armless.

In the space where "arms" should be is a messy bulging area. Astronomers Leo Blitz and Evan Levine of the University of California published their paper about this new image of the Milky Way in the Science Express June edition. According to these two astronomers, the bulging area in the far side of the galaxy might have been caused by galactic collisions.

The asymmetrical shape of the entire galaxy may have been caused by either colossal cannibalistic galactic collisions or intergalactic tides. Like tides of the Earth, these intergalactic tides are caused by satellites - in this case, in the form of Magellanic Clouds.

Like the external gravitational tug of the moon to the Earth's oceans, the clouds may also have "tugged" at the far side of the galaxy and caused the bulge.

According to these astronomers, further studies will be conducted to gather more information about the galaxy.