NASA UPDATES: NASA astronomers unravel secret of the supernova

Supernovas have long been used as “cosmic mile markers” to gauge the expansion of the universe, but NASA scientists now claim that they’ve at last discovered what actually sparks the massive stellar explosions.

A team of astronomers led by Mr. Marat Gilfanov used NASA’s Chandra X-Ray laboratory to study supernovas in 5 close by elliptical galaxies also the central region of the Andromeda galaxy — a spiral galaxy nearby to our own, the Milky Way.

They found that the majority Type 1a supernovas are sparked by the merging of 2 white dwarf stars, or else the collapsed remnant of old stars.

The stars become unstable when they go beyond their weight limit which causes a stellar explosion, the Telegraph reported.

“It was a major embarrassment that we didn’t know how they (supernovas) worked. Now we’re beginning to understand what lights the fuse of these explosions, said Marat Gilfanov, an astronomer from the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, Germany.

Formerly it was thought that Type 1a supernovas were also caused by accretion — as the gravity of a star draws in enough material as of a sun-like companion and becomes unstable.

Though, Akos Bogdan of the Max Planck Institute said: “If the supernovas were produced by accretion, the galaxies will be roughly 50 times brighter in x-rays than actually observed.”

It is not obvious whether merging is also the primary cause of supernovas in spiral galaxies, also further study is required, he said.

Pairs of white dwarfs are very difficult to find.

Once the white dwarfs spiral into distances when they are about to merge, it will just takes a few tenths of a second for them to blow up.