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Chandrasekhar Limit Violated by Supernova |
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Andrew Howell, formerly of the Physics Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and now at the University of Toronto, and Peter Nugent, an astrophysicist with Berkeley Lab's Computational Research Division said in a report, which appeared in the September 21 issue of Nature, as lead authors that a Supernova called SNLS-03D3bb in galaxy 4 billion light years away, is found to be more than twice as bright as most Type Ia supernovae, has much less kinetic energy but startlingly appears to be half as massive as a typical Type Ia supernova. In other words, it simply has overgrown the famed Chandrasekhar Limit!
"Chandrasekhar's 1931 model of stellar collapse was elegant and powerful; it won him the Nobel Prize," says Nugent. "But it was a simple one-dimensional model. Just by adding rotation one can exceed the Chandrasekhar mass, as he himself recognized," he added.
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