A SUPERNOVA that exploded in 2001 was surprisingly squashed, say astronomers who witnessed the cataclysmic event.
Using the Very Large Telescope in Chile, an international team of astronomers saw that one axis of the exploding white dwarf star was 10 per cent shorter than the other. But this type of supernova, dubbed Type Ia, should be symmetrical, according to theory.
“We had better try to understand what is happening,” says team member Dietrich Baade at the European Southern Observatory in Munich, Germany. Such supernovae are hugely important in cosmology because their brightness is used to calculate distances. The team suggest that the deformity could be caused…
