Exploding stars in near-solar space may have triggered at least two mass extinction events in Earth’s history. A new study ...

Exploding stars known as supernovas may have sparked mass extinctions that wiped out up to 85% of animals on Earth.

"If a massive star were to explode as a supernova close to the Earth, the results would be devastating for life on Earth," said Nick Wright, an astrophysicist at Keele University in the United Kingdom ...

As part of this, the research team calculated the supernova rate within 20 parsecs of the Sun, or approximately 65 light-years, and compared this with the approximate rate of mass extinction events on ...

Illustration of a supernova X-ray blast wave. (Credit: NASA/CXC/M. Weiss) Lead author Caitlyn Nojiri is now applying for graduate school and hopes to get a Ph.D. in astrophysics. Isolated by mountains ...

The analysis then revealed that the later spike likely came from a supernova, either from a group ... Earth for 100,000 years after the initial blast, creating a pattern matching that of the ...

Dr. Jeonghee Rho studies supernovae and their remnants to investigate the origin of dust and molecules in the early and local Universe. Supernovae play a key role in the chemical and dust budget of ...

A supernova is a cataclysmic stellar death that leaves behind a black hole or neutron star. It is the biggest, brightest, and most violent type of explosion scientists have observed in the universe.

When Nojiri and colleagues simulated what that supernova was like, they found that it hammered the Earth with cosmic rays for 100,000 years following the blast. The model perfectly explained a ...