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Summary: 13 APRIL 2007 VOL 316 SCIENCE www.sciencemag.org194
CREDIT:D.LAMB/UNIVERSITYOFCHICAGO
SANTA BARBARA, CALIFORNIA--When
astronomers wish upon a star, they wish they
knew more about how stars explode. In par-
ticular, experts on the stellar explosions
known as supernovae wonder whether text-
book accounts tell the true story--especially
for a popular probe of the universe's history,
the supernovae designated as type Ia.
In fact, new observational surveys sug-
gest that cosmic evidence based on type Ia
supernovae rests on a less-than-secure theo-
retical foundation. "We put the theory in the
textbooks because it sounds right. But we
don't really know it's right, and I think people
are beginning to worry," says Robert Kirshner,
a supernova researcher at the Harvard-
Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA)
in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "We keep say-
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