as in supernova
astronomy
a star that suddenly increases greatly in brightness and then within a few months or years becomes less bright again
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Recent Examples of nova
To get a separate measure of how unusual this is, the researchers placed 8 million novas around the center of the galaxy, with the distribution being random but biased to match the galaxy's brightness under the assumption that novas will be more frequent in areas with more stars.
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John Timmer, Ars Technica, 27 Sep. 2024
John Timmer, Ars Technica, 27 Sep. 2024
Recent Examples of Synonyms for nova
Noun
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Identifying details in pre-explosion images can help inform the how, when and why supernovas occur.—
Robert Z. Pearlman,
Space.com,
24 Mar. 2025
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Over five years, their telescope in the Chilean Andes snapped high-resolution photographs of 12% of the sky, creating the most extensive catalog of supernovas to date and locating the same spherical shells traced out by many millions of galaxies (albeit with less precision than DESI).—
Charlie Wood,
Quanta Magazine,
19 Mar. 2025
Noun
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Luckily for scientists, this rapid spin and its precise frequency make pulsars excellent timing mechanisms.—
Robert Lea,
Space.com,
28 Feb. 2025
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Among other things, it is expected to be able to hunt for the universe’s first stars, search for signals from an extraterrestrial intelligence, and enable the detection of new pulsars—the spinning remnants of dead stars—in our galaxy and others.—
IEEE Spectrum,
IEEE Spectrum,
26 Sep. 2016
Noun
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Among its findings are the measurements of nearly 15 million galaxies and quasars, some of the brightest objects in the universe.—
Ashley Strickland,
CNN Money,
2 Apr. 2025
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Radio quasars are the subclass of black holes that produce the most powerful energy and jets.—
David Garofalo,
The Conversation,
31 Mar. 2025
Noun
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Importantly, the two groups, only a few weeks apart in age, were not expected to differ significantly from one another, which would reduce the probability of confounding variables.—
New Atlas,
New Atlas,
5 Apr. 2025
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How other countries respond to the tariffs is another variable to consider.—
Jesse Pound,
CNBC,
4 Apr. 2025
Noun
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Imaging the innermost circumstellar environment of the red supergiant WOH G64 in the Large Magellanic Cloud.—
Tom Howarth,
Newsweek,
21 Nov. 2024
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Unlike other supergiants, however, a segment of Bathynomus vaderi’s back section narrows and curves backward in a unique way.—
Margherita Bassi,
Smithsonian Magazine,
27 Jan. 2025
Noun
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Previously, long radio bursts were only traced to neutron stars, the dense remnants left after a colossal stellar explosion.—
Ashley Strickland,
CNN,
14 Mar. 2025
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Previously, long-period radio bursts like this one had only been traced back to neutron stars, meaning this work puts an entirely new spin on their origins.—
Robert Lea,
Space.com,
12 Mar. 2025
Noun
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This sell-off indicated a sense that the next wave of AI models may not require the tens of thousands of top-end GPUs that Silicon Valley behemoths have amassed into computing superclusters for the purposes of accelerating their AI innovation.—
Miles Klee,
Rolling Stone,
28 Jan. 2025
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For instance, Oracle recently chose AMD’s accelerated computing chips to power its latest supercluster for high-intensity AI workloads, after testing showed that AMD’s GPUs delivered low latency and strong performance at a competitive price.—
Trefis Team,
Forbes,
16 Jan. 2025
Cite this Entry
“Nova.” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/nova. Accessed 11 Apr. 2025.
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