The cosmos is rife with wonders that have been discovered and that have yet to be discovered. One example is the former is NCG 6188. Don't let its scientific sounding name fool you. A photograph of this emission nebula reveals it to be more beautiful than its name lets on. View the picture in the full article after the jump.

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.

Space may not be the final frontier just yet since we still have quite a few mysteries here on Earth, but it does have its own share of unexplained phenomena. One of these mysteries is the neutron star; the remains of a collapsed star. NASA is currently observing what may be a neutron star evolving before their very eyes. Details in the full article.

Physicists at Florida State University, with the help of The REsonator SOLenoid with Upscale Transmission (RESOLUT), are creating supernovas in an attempt to further their understanding of the universe. Their latest experiment had RESOLUT creating certain types of radioactive materials which are also present in Type 1a supernovas.

This type of supernova is what happens when a white dwarf (a type of star) hits critical mass and starts an explosive chain-reaction from its carbon fusion core. This event lasts about one second and leaves nothing in its wake.

Since Type 1a supernovas have a constant energy signature, the variations in its light signature is only changed due to its distance Earth. Thus, these experiments have already yielded us a method for measuring the distance from the dying star. Physicist Ingo Wiedenhover, explained this:

It is what astrophysicists call a "standard candle" for mapping out distances. At the same time they look at the observed redshift [describing a supernova's velocity away from Earth] and measure the expansion of the universe.

Not all Type 1a supernovae have exactly the same brightness. Our effort is to make a model of brightness differences. To do this we need to understand the physics of the explosions.

A few of the more recent supernovas have shown that our universe might be growing at a faster rate than scientists have predicted. If this is confirmed, then Edwin Hubble's steady-expansionist theory will be disproved. Quite a few of the conjectures based on this theory may have to be scrapped. Regardless, it brings us a step closer to understanding the mystery that is our universe.

Astronomers have discovered what appears to be a neutron star in Earth's neighborhood. The star has been nicknamed Calvera - after the bad guy in the 1960s western film The Magnificent Seven - and was first noticed by Robert Rutlidge of McGill University in Montreal, Canada.

With help from NASA's Swift satellite, the dead star's position was pinpointed more accurately. The Swift observations showed that the dead star wasn't associated with any known astronomical object, branding it as an isolated neutron star. If confirmed, it will be the eighth isolated neutron star, joining seven others that have already been discovered.

According to BBC News, the term "isolated neutron star" refers to a neutron star that "does not have an associated supernova remnant, binary companion, or radio pulsations". Calvera's exact type has yet to be determined, and Dr Rutledge has said that "either Calvera is an unusual example of a known type of neutron star, or it is some new type of neutron star, the first of its kind".

Imagine a star venturing a little too close to a black hole's event horizon and getting caught in an inescapable death trap. What do you see? Most of us would probably think of the star spiraling its hydrogen and helium into the abyss of space, but scientists say that it might be more violent than that.

According to astronomers in the Observatoire de Paris, violent explosions resulting from immense gravitational turbulence could happen when a star is drawn in, making way from some truly astounding stellar fireworks.

While some theorists have argued that the differing pulls in the gravitational field of a black hole may flatten a star's material like a pancake, this may not be entirely true. Some scientists suggest that while the pancake stage may happen, there are definitely a lot of indications that say that explosions will eventually rip the star apart from within.

What results after the gravity tears the pancake apart is a mass of glowing matter falling into the vortex never to escape again. NASA's GALEX spacecraft may have already seen such an event which was originally suspected to be a supernova. What it actually saw might have been an invisible black hole which is feeding on a star and blew it up in the process.

Some experts, however, find these theories and observations inconclusive. Supernova specialist Chris Fryer of the Los Alamos National Observatory says that  simulating deaths of celestial bodies is hard work. The full grasp of how it happens is not at hand at this time, making for a puzzle with plenty of missing pieces.

Eta Carinae is considered to be one of the largest single stars in the whole Milky Way galaxy. Its mass is estimated to be 100 to 150 times larger than our own sun and its luminosity is about four million times brighter, and astronomers from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) have just located its potential rival.

According to scientists, two massive stars labelled LH54-425 are currently orbiting so close to each other in a galaxy outside Milky Way. Now, these two have the potential to merge and create a "super sun." George Sonneborn of NASA commented:

The merger of two massive stars to make a single super star of over 80 suns could lead to an object like Eta Carinae, which might have looked like LH54-425 one million years ago. Finding stars this massive so early in their life is very rare. These results expand our understanding of the nature of very massive binaries.

Sonneborn added that the system will eventually produce a very energetic supernova. However, that event is still very distant as the stars are just less than three million years old. LH54-425 contain about 62 and 37 times the mass of our sun respectively and are about 165,000 light years from Earth.

On a related matter, NASA astronomers mentioned earlier this month that Eta Carinae may be nearing extinction. Their prediction was based on the recent discovery of a supernova known as SN 2006gy. According to them, the star that produced that supernova expelled a large amount of mass prior to exploding.

Likewise, Eta Carinae is currently losing a lot of mass.

Astronomers have recently discovered a supernova so large that it has warranted scientists to question their understanding of how certain older stars disintegrate. Experts have long believed that dying stars known as "white dwarfs" can't expand to more than 1.4 times the size of our sun without going kablooey.

The rule is known as the "Chandrasekhar Limit," and it has served as the foundation of decades and decades of astrophysical research and has been used by scientists to estimate the size of the universe.

In the discovery, the Astronomers have found a supernova in a galaxy 4 billion light years away that reached a mass twice that of the sun before exploding. As always, now that they've seen it, they now have to figure out how nature did it. They think that the star could've been spinning so fast that the centrifugal force pushed it beyond the usual limits. Or the explosion could have come from two white-dwarf stars merging.

Even though the discovered supernova doesn't necessarily undermine other previous research, scientists say that they'll be more cautious about incorporating the Chandrasekhar Limit into their future work. Well, science is all about making discovering new things and maybe making present text books obsolete, but we do hope they succeed in their research.

After decades of prominence as the "theory of everything," challengers say that String Theory is in trouble. Why? Because there haven't been much experiments to prove it and there don't seem to be any on the horizon. For decades, scientists have been looking for a "theory of everything" to unite the fundamental theories of physics: general relativity, electromagnetism, and quantum mechanics.

The problem is that general relativity remains distinctly divorced from the standard model of particle physics. The theory of the very very big, just can't seem to fit with the theory of the very very small.

Enter String theory. String theory in a broad sense envisions subatomic particles as strings and loops of vibrating energy rather than point-like particles of the standard model. The world is basically made up of "strings."

Detractors contend that aspects of string theory may turn out to be true, but most of the theory is built on elegant mathematics instead of empirical experiments. In particular, detractors charge that string theorists just fudged their models to explain away dark energy, a hypothetical energy that pulls galaxies away from one another at an accelerating rate.

John Schwartz of the California Institute of Technology, one of the fathers of modern string theory said that in the future, experiments will verify string theory. The issue is how much energy is needed for an experiment where you would have to pound into a collision of particles just to reveal strings.

Many physicists hope the Europe's Large Hadron Collider facility will offer some answers. Perhaps then, after they've pounded several particles into each other, they will find what they need.

Supernovae are a rare phenomenon indeed. Major ones tend to be seen only about once every 10 or 20 years. The most recent supernova, observed by scientists on Earth (before February 2006), occurred in 1998. The supernova (or death of a star) that was seen in 1998 was considered minor by celestial standards.

That explosion didn't even give rise to a black hole, as is common in the case of large exploding stars. A neutron star, common after smaller supernovae, was the final result of the 1998 explosion. The supernova that was observed this February was similar in size to the one in 1998; it was small, if you can call any supernova small.

NASA has a system in place that utilizes available technology to alert scientists as quickly as possible to instances of supernova in the vicinity and quickly pan their instruments and telescopes to gather data about the event. This particular supernova lasted an unusually long time (some 40 minutes); giving NASA's Swift satellite plenty of time to pan over to bring the supernova into view and gather as much data as possible.

"Usually these gamma ray bursts last fractions of a second to a couple hundred seconds," said Alex Filippenko, professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley. "This lasted many thousands of seconds. "The Swift satellite finds these things as soon as they go off, but the longer they last the more we can watch in real time, and others can turn their telescopes to it in real time."

Scientists continue to speculate about why this supernova lasted so long and what made it so unique. By getting such a detailed view of this most recent supernova event scientists will be better able to answer questions about supernovae from concerned policy makers and even possibly create technologies or methods to mitigate any possible hazards the Earth may face from gamma ray bursts in the future.