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posted 05. January 2006 21:44
Source: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
December 21, 2005
NR-05-12-06
Astronomers detect echoes from ancient supernovae
Anne M. Stark
A team of astronomers has found faint visible “echoes” of three ancient supernovae by detecting centuries-old light reflected by interstellar gas clouds hundreds of light-years removed from the original explosions.
Paragraph 5:
“The exciting thing for me is that the light echo discovery was serendipity,” said Livermore astronomer Kem Cook, a co-author on the paper that appears in the Dec. 22, 2005, edition of Nature. “We are carrying out a large wide-field, time-domain survey looking for the signature of dark matter, and as a bonus we are discovering unexpected things like these light echoes. Serendipitous discoveries are a key element of large surveys and will likely be an important element of even larger future surveys in which LLNL is involved, such as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope.”
Read the full press release at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
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