Supernovas: Making Astronomical History

Supernovas, the glamorous death throes of massive stars, have pushed scientific knowledge further and further into the unknown for thousands of years. Our current project, SNEWS, is only the most recent chapter in a very long story.

Table of Contents

• Ancient Astronomy (190 BCE--1546 CE)
• Tycho and Kepler (1546 CE--1604 CE)
• • Ophiuchus
• Telescope Era (1605 CE--2004 CE)
• • Spectroscopy
  • Nuclear Energy
  • Stellar Fusion
  • Neutrinos
• Poisson Statistics

Further Reading: Online Resources

• Scotland's University of St. Andrews hosts the MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, which contains biographies of many significant individuals.
• Wikipedia is a free on-line information repository. Useful starting points include the following:
• • Neutrino
  • Supernova

Further Reading: Books

• The Exploding Suns (1985, updated in 1996), by Isaac Asimov and William Gutch. The supernova saga, organized in chronological order from Hipparchus to the 1990s.
• The Supernova Story (1988), by Laurence A. Marschall. Contains a slightly different presentation of the historical material than Asimov's book.

Test Your Understanding! SNEWS has now cordially made available a set of "homework" problems, based upon the astronomy taught here, and geared to the high-school level. Designed to test algebra skills and provoke critical thinking, these problems are ideal for the teacher wishing to expand a science curriculum. Each problem should be comprehensible to a student familiar with basic algebra (up to logarithms). A typical first-year chemistry class may provide useful background, since some questions address chemical reactions and quantities measured in "moles".

• Problems
• Solutions

Researched, written and maintained by Blake Stacey.