You wouldn't think the brightest exploding stars ever discovered in the universe could need some light shed on them, but they got it anyway.

A new paper proposes that the most luminous supernovae – exploding stars – are powered by small and incredibly dense neutron stars, with gigantic magnetic fields that spin hundreds of times a second.

Scientists observed two super-luminous supernovae for more than a year. Contrary to existing theories, which suggested that the brightest supernovae are caused by super-massive stars exploding, the findings suggest that their origins may be better explained by a type of explosion within the star's core which creates a smaller but extremely dense and rapidly spinning magnetic star.

The intermediate Palomar Transient Factory (iPTF) was developed to help scientists learn more about the complex nature of celestial objects in the universe and began searching the skies for certain types of stars and related phenomena in February.

Emissions standards are easy for politicians. They just consult some people whose opinion they happen to like and pick a number. 

Then it is up for science and engineering to make it possible, whatever the cost. 

In 2012, California approved standards to reduce emissions from passenger cars to 3 milligrams, or a millionth of an ounce, per mile over the 2017-2021 automobile model years. Part of the justification politicians used was a gross miscalculation by the California Air Resources Board, which overstated some emissions by 340% to make the problem look urgent.

Researchers have found evidence that magnetic waves in a polar coronal hole contain enough energy to heat the corona and that they also deposit most of their energy at sufficiently low heights for the heat to spread throughout the corona.

The observations help to answer a 70-year-old solar physics conundrum about the unexplained extreme temperature of the Sun's corona – known as the coronal heating problem.

The team analyzed data from the Extreme Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrometer onboard the Japanese satellite Hinode. They used observations of a polar coronal hole, a region of the Sun where the magnetic fields lines stretch from the solar surface far into interplanetary space.