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Oh, please........This sounds more like a publicity stunt by an aspiring astonomy student, to me. Did I miss something, or was there no corraboration from anybody else in the article? Sandstroms supervisor doesn't count, unless he's a lot more respected than Latham.

I believe that the Chandrasekar limit applies to a star before it collapses. It's the act of compression that generates the energy to cause a star to blow. Adding more mass to a white dwarf would do nothing to cause a nova, super or otherwise.

Who is the New Scientist? The article is written for a popular audience, not for the astronomy student's peers. Has anybody seen this info published in a peer review journal? "Science" comes to mind, or even Scientific American, at least S.A. is written for a better educated popular audience.

Sorry about the previous, incomplete reply. I hit "post", rather than "preview" while trying to figure out how to spell "Chandrasekar". I kept thinking Chandra Levi, and I knew that wasn't right.

I tend to think that the letter from Karin deploring the bonehead reporter is genuine. I especially liked her last note of ignoring reporters. That's how I know she is still a student.

Once she is a full professor she'll understand that reporters are very useful in keeping the grant money flowing. A typical feminist sociologist would correctly understand that this problem will keep her in grant money for 300 million years.