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    Early views of a supernova’s first moments reveal a lopsided blast

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    When one supernova commenced, it looked like an olive — at least before it got shaken and stirred.

    This insight, reported in the Nov. 12 Science Advances, comes from new observations taken in the wake of a massive star’s death. As some of the most comprehensive views ever captured of a supernova’s first moments, the findings give astronomers important clues about how these explosions begin.

    On April 10, 2024, a supernova was detected in a nearby galaxy. Over the next 26 hours, an international collaboration of astronomers sprang into action to gather additional observations of the explosion before it progressed too far. Their efforts produced the earliest look at the shape of any supernova — the explosive death of a massive star — and revealed its blast wave breaking through the stellar surface.  More

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      How did Pluto capture its largest moon, Charon?

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      McKenzie Prillaman is a science and health journalist based in Washington, DC. She holds a bachelor’s degree in neuroscience from the University of Virginia and a master’s degree in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She was the spring 2023 intern at Science News. More

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      Some planets might home brew their own water

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      Some planets might produce their own water instead of relying on outside sources.

      In laboratory experiments, researchers simulated extreme conditions found within certain exoplanets by blasting olivine — a mineral abundant in planetary interiors — with high-energy lasers in the presence of hydrogen gas. Hydrogen strips the minerals of their oxygen atoms, which then react with the hydrogen to form water, the team reports October 29 in Nature.

      The discovery offers a viable explanation for water-rich exoplanets orbiting close to their host stars, the researcher say. The process might even account for the origin of some of Earth’s water, adding a new piece to a longstanding mystery. More

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      Dwarf planet Makemake sports the most remote gas in the solar system

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      More than 2 billion kilometers farther from the sun than Pluto, a frigid world named Makemake sports the most distant gas ever seen in our solar system, new observations reveal.

      “By surprise, we found evidence of gas” on Makemake, even though it currently resides 53 times as far from the sun as Earth does, says Silvia Protopapa, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. She and her colleagues submitted the discovery September 8 to arXiv.org. More

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      This black hole flipped its magnetic field

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      The magnetic field swirling around an enormous black hole, located about 55 million light-years from Earth, has unexpectedly switched directions. This dramatic reversal challenges theories of black hole physics and provides scientists with new clues about the dynamic nature of these shadowy giants.

      The supermassive black hole, nestled in the heart of the M87 galaxy, was first imaged in 2017. Those images revealed, for the first time, a glowing ring of plasma­ — an accretion disk — encircling the black hole, dubbed M87*. At the time, the disk’s properties, including those of the magnetic field embedded in the plasma, matched theoretical predictions. More