Question

Are supernovas Plasma?

Answer 1

A supernova (plural supernovae) is a stellar explosion which produces an extremely bright object made of plasma that declines to invisibility over weeks or months. To help answer the question of why the universe's magnetic field is so strong, the researchers put a rod of carbon about 500 microns (just under one-50th of an inch) into a chamber filled with argon, an inert gas at low pressure. Near the carbon, they placed a plastic grid, which served as a barrier to simulate the interstellar medium.Then they fired a powerful laser beam at the carbon. When the beam hit the rod, the carbon vaporized. A shock wave of plasma — charged particles — expanded from where the carbon was. The blast would've looked like a very quick flash of light, if viewed with a high-speed camera, as the high power laser means one shouldn't look at the light directly with unprotected eyes. There was so much energy in the plasma that it mimicked a supernova, except instead of blasting out over light years and taking months to brighten and die out, the whole thing was over in a fraction of a second.