SN 2021yfj is a first-of-its-kind 'bare bones' supernova that’s upending our understanding of stellar evolution. This rare stellar blast reveals a heavy-element core, challenging theories of how massive stars live and die. It was a blast ;) ---to work on the visualizations of this event with astronomer Steve Schulze and team for the W. M. Keck Observatory. @keckobservatory This is also featured in the latest issue of @nature_the_journal SN 2021yfj was discovered in September 2021, using the wide-field camera on the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) based on Palomar Mountain in Southern California.  After looking through ZTF data, Schulze spotted an extremely luminous object in a star-forming region located 2.2 billion light-years from Earth. Without any idea what it was, but recognizing they had never seen it before, Schulze and Miller sought to obtain the object’s spectrum to determine which elements were present in the explosion. Schulze contacted Yi Yang, then a postdoctoral scholar in Alex Filippenko’s group and now an assistant professor at Tsinghua University, China. Filippenko, a distinguished professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, had been very interested in infant supernovae himself and was intrigued by the object. Fortuitously, he happened to be observing at Keck Observatory and was able to quickly pivot to capture the spectrum of this newly discovered celestial transient using Keck Observatory’s Low-Resolution Imaging Spectrograph (LRIS). “It’s so exciting to discover a new class of exploding star, especially one that provides a confirmation of some of our theories of how massive stars evolve with time, yet also reveals interesting new puzzles,” said Filippenko. “It was very fortunate that my team was using the Keck I telescope the night SN 2021yfj was discovered — we were able to obtain a spectrum that directly led to the realization that this was an incredibly special new type of supernova. Opportunities of this kind are rare!” #supernova #space #animation #science #astronomy Great write-up here: https://keckobservatory.org/sn2021yfj/

REC137A #miniature

Peace ✌🏻 #miniature

Had to re-do the top piece in resin because the FDM version was too low resolution … but I am experimenting with what I can get away with on the FDM #experiment #miniature #diorama

New miniature followed by ChatGPT re-creating both images - one try each no effort lol #miniature #art

A lot of math in physics requires hidden dimensions to explain what we are seeing. #hiddendimensions #physics

The universe could be spherical, but it appears flat, just like the Earth seems flat to us. #universe #photo #glitter

EXP706 New star creation method. All in-camera images #miniature #diorama #space

CGI water has come a long way, just seeing what I can do #testing #c4d There's no realistic displacement, or boyancy, but I am not going for the A-level game in this domain lol

BTS core