Boston
RECREATING an exploding star in your lab sounds impossible, not to mention
foolhardy. But that’s what Bruce Remington of Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory in California has done in a bid to understand the biggest shockwaves
in the Universe.
When a huge star runs out of fuel and collapses, its core rebounds outwards
in a huge explosion called a supernova. The edge of the explosion is marked by a
shockwave, where the debris is moving faster than the speed of sound. On Earth,
shockwaves travel spherically out from an explosion. But astronomers see sinewy
fingers of debris spreading out from…
