I'm John Bachelor, Bob Zimmerman, Behind the Black, Happy Birthday for the month of February.

We turn to space exploration. Heliosphere. What is that, Bob?

You know, we've got some science stories here, John, that are all cool images.

So people should go to Behind the Black to take a look at these, to take a look at these because they're really cool.

This is using Chandra and the Hubble Space Telescope,

astronomers have actually made the first visual detection of another star's heliosphere.

The heliosphere around the sun is created by the solar wind. It pushes outward, and its sphere is determined by interstellar material. At a certain

point, the pressure of the solar wind matches the pressure of interstellar material, and that's

where the helo-sphere's diameter is. Well, we've now detected around a star, what is it, about 160 light

years away, I think that's the distance.

But it's not relatively close.

This star, and they got an x-ray image of this heliosphere.

And you can also see the accretion disk of dusk that surrounds the star giant.

It's very cool, and it just indicates the increase in technology in space.

The web as telescope keeps coming up with things that aren't there, but suddenly they're

there. What have they found this time?

This is another cool image I've gotten behind the black. This is not having to do with deep

space cosmology, though, John. This has to do with supernova. One of the biggest challenges

faces scientists with supernova is they see the supernova, but seeing what the original star was

before the explosion has been a challenge. Pretty much until the last decade, they never knew

what those original stars were like. And so there's a lot of guesswork. What causes a supernova?

In the last decade, technology has allowed them to identify some progenitors of supernova.

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