From Mica
Whence Supernovae?
A talk by Rob Knop, Quest University, Canada.
There are two types of supernovae: thermonuclear and core-collapse supernovae. Both signal the deaths of stars as best we understand them. Thermonuclear supernovae in particular have been important as tools to tell us about the Universe. It was observations of such events out to great distances that told us the expansion of the Universe is accelerating. Yet, supernova science has a dirty secret: our model for how these events occur hasn't been observationally confirmed. In the last year, X-ray observations have called into question what many of us believed to be the primary mechanism for the production of such stellar explosions. In this talk, I'll give an overview of what we do know about these thermonuclear supernovae, and what the current state of knowledge is in figuring out just where they came from.
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Audio Recording