The ongoing Supernovae Legacy Survey, which led to the discovery, involves comparing the supernovae of nearby galaxies to those which can be spotted igniting up to nine billion light-years away.

That distance means the light from these galaxies is nine billion years old, so they are images of the past. The researchers found that the more distant supernovae were on average 12 percent brighter than their modern counterparts.

“It is a little bit of a mystery as to why,” said astronomer Andrew Howell, a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Toronto. Howell is the lead author of a paper on the matter published in the September 20 issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The types of supernovae involved in this case are not those gigantic eruptions which signal one-time, implosion-triggered suicides of super-massive stars. Rather, they are repeating type Ia supernovae. These are believed to be created by a shrunken stellar corpse called a white dwarf as it sucks material off a companion star — probably a bloated, dying red giant star.

The explosions come about when the material piles up on the white dwarf’s surface until the bottom of the pile reaches critical density and it sets off a gigantic thermonuclear blast.

Full story at discovery.com

The warping shows up as smeared lines of iron gas whipping around the stars, University of Michigan and NASA astronomers say. The finding also indicates a size limit for the celestial objects.

The same distortions have been spotted around black holes and even around Earth, so while the finding may not be a surprise, it is significant for answering basic questions of physics, said study team member Sudip Bhattacharyya of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. and the University of Maryland, College Park.

Full story at Space.com