Everything in the world dies, even stars. A supernova occurs when a star “dies.” A supernova is the explosion of a star. These explosions release huge amounts of energy, an amount equivalent to a few octillion nuclear warheads, or one million tons of TNT. One supernova will radiate more energy that our son will its entire lifetime. Supernovae play a huge part in the galaxy by being a primary source of heavy elements in the universe Throughout a large stars life, they create heavy elements within their core. When one of these stars star explodes, it releases the heavy elements into the galaxy. The elements then disperse and move on to create new stars and the cycle continues anew.
Supernovae occur when a star can no longer resist the force of gravity and collapse. There are two types of supernovae. Type II supernovae have hydrogen absorption lines in their light spectrum. Type II supernovae occur in stars with masses much greater than our sun. They are an implosion-explosion event. During fusion, outward pressure is created to balance the inward pull of gravity. However once the star runs out of fuel, the star will expand into a red supergiant. While the star is still a red supergiant, the core become hotter and denser. During this time more nuclear reactions occur, delaying the collapse of the core. However once the core is out of fuel this time, it has nothing left to fuse and the core collapses. The implosions, or collapse, of the iron cores of massive stars are caused from extreme pressure. When the core collapses, the core will rise to over 100 billion degrees. The energy from the iron crushing together will be overcome by gravity at first, but will bounce back through the layers of the star. When it reached the hydrogen envelope of the star, it explodes and a shock wave occurs. Many heavy elements are released by the explosion and are dispersed throughout the galaxy to form new stars
Type I supernovae, lack hydrogen in their line spectra. These types of supernovae exhibit a sharp maxima in their light curves, then gradually dies away. There are three subclasses of type I, Ia, Ib, and Ic. In type Ia, the white dwarf star has a companion star in a binary system. The stars must be close enough where the red giant’s material may flow into the white dwarf.
Starting with black holes, Khalili describes the creation of one. I found that a black hole is what remains when a massive star dies. Because stars are so massive and made out of gas, there is an intense gravitational field that is always trying to collapse the star. As the star dies, the nuclear fusion reactions stop because the fuel for these reactions gets burned up. At the same time, the star's gravity pulls material inward and compresses the core. As the core compresses, it heats up and eventually creates a supernova explosion in which the material and radiation blasts out into space. What remains is the highly compressed and extremely massive core. The core's gravity is so strong that even light cannot escape. This object is now a black hole and literally cannot be seen because of the absence of light. Because the core's gravity is so strong, the core sinks through the fabric of space-time, creating a hole in space-time. The core becomes the central part of the black hole called the singularity. The opening of the hole is called the event horizon. Khalili describes that there are two different kinds of black holes:
Brown dwarfs are objects in space that sit between the lines of being a star and a planet. This object is dim and hard to distinguish from low mass stars at the early stages of the dwarf’s life. They are often called failed stars because they start their life the same way as regular stars. However, in some stage, they just didn’t have enough mass gathered to generate the fusion-powered energy of a star. Scientists are certain that brown dwarfs are the missing link between stars and planets but the formations of dwarfs are still a mystery.
The authors' prospected views on the future of our galaxy are rather harsh. The authors argue that a billion terrestrial years from now-in 10 galactic years-the galaxy will look much like it does now. Certain details, however, will be different. As the sun executes its next ten circuits around our galaxy's central hub, our today-familiar constellations will be scrambled one hundred times over. Many of the night stars in the sky will no longer exist. Deneb and Rigel, for example, will explode as supernovae. Sirious will swell into a red giant and puff out a planetary nebula. Alpha Centauri, currently the sun's closest neighbor, will recede from the sun, and its apparent brightness will fade below the threshold of naked-eye visibility.
Stars explode at the end of their lifetime, sometimes when they explode the stars leave a remnant of gasses and, dust behind. What the gasses come together to form depend on the size of the remnant. If the remnant is less than 1.4 solar masses it will become a white dwarf, a hot dead star that is not bright enough to shine. If the remnant is roughly 1.4 solar masses, it will collapse. “The protons and electrons will be squashed together, and their elementary particles will recombine to form neutrons”. What results from this reaction is called a neut...
The Orion Nebula is an emission nebula because of the O-type and B-type stars contained within it. These high-temperature stars emit ultraviolet (UV) light that ionizes the surrounding hydrogen atoms into protons (H+) and electrons (e-). When the protons and electrons recombine, the electrons enter a higher energy level (n=3). Then, when the electron drops from the n=3 level to the n=2 level, an Hphoton is emitted. 2 This photon has a wavelength of 6563 Å, and therefore corresponds to the red portion of the visible spectrum. It is these H photons which give the nebula the distinctive red color which we see.
A white dwarf uses electron degeneracy pressure to support itself. It is because of the electron degeneracy pressure that white dwarfs have a small size relative to other types of stars.
After World War II the country of Czechoslovakia was suffering at the hands of the decision to accept the US Marshall Plan or submit to the Soviets and become and communist state. The majority of eastern central Europe was threatened into becoming members of the Soviet regime and thus turned into Communist states. At the beginning of the 1950’s after Czechoslovakia had become a fully Communist State, the living situation and daily life had changed for the worse and we can see these effects in the books, The Joke and Life Under a Cruel Star. In Kundera’s book we follow the life of the young man named Jahn and get a glimpse at what life was like in a communist state on both the good and bad sides of the party. Daily life in a communist
34 Cygni- Hypergiant luminous blue star which is rare and only found in places with intense star formation. Are Usually short lived because of
A star begins as nothing more than a very light distribution of interstellar gases and dust particles over a distance of a few dozen lightyears. Although there is extremely low pressure existing between stars, this distribution of gas exists instead of a true vacuum. If the density of gas becomes larger than .1 particles per cubic centimeter, the interstellar gas grows unstable. Any small deviation in density, and because it is impossible to have a perfectly even distribution in these clouds this is something that will naturally occur, and the area begins to contract. This happens because between about .1 and 1 particles per cubic centimeter, pressure gains an inverse relationship with density. This causes internal pressure to decrease with increasing density, which because of the higher external pressure, causes the density to continue to increase. This causes the gas in the interstellar medium to spontaneously collect into denser clouds. The denser clouds will contain molecular hydrogen (H2) and interstellar dust particles including carbon compounds, silicates, and small impure ice crystals. Also, within these clouds, there are 2 types of zones. There are H I zones, which contain neutral hydrogen and often have a temperature around 100 Kelvin (K), and there are H II zones, which contain ionized hydrogen and have a temperature around 10,000 K. The ionized hydrogen absorbs ultraviolet light from it’s environment and retransmits it as visible and infrared light. These clouds, visible to the human eye, have been named nebulae. The density in these nebulae is usually about 10 atoms per cubic centimeter. In brighter nebulae, there exists densities of up to several thousand atoms per cubic centimete...
Tyler, Pat. Supernova. NASA’s Heasarc: Education and Public Information. 26 Jan. 2003. 22 Nov. 2004
The Big Bang, the alpha of existence for the building blocks of stars, happened approximately fourteen billion years ago. The elements produced by the big bang consisted of hydrogen and helium with trace amounts of lithium. Hydrogen and helium are the essential structure which build stars. Within these early stars, heavier elements were slowly formed through a process known as nucleosynthesis. Nucleosythesis is the process of creating new atomic nuclei from pre-existing nucleons. As the stars expel their contents, be it going supernova, solar winds, or solar explosions, these heavier elements along with other “star stuff” are ejected into the interstellar medium where they will later be recycled into another star. This physical process of galactic recycling is how or solar system's mass came to contain 2% of these heavier elements.
There are two types of ways a Supernova can be triggered. The first trigger is the result of a white dwarf accumulating matter from a companion. This causes the dwarf to reach a core temperature too high to survive which in turn makes an explosion. The second trigger is when a star’s nuclear fuel is diminishing and can no longer support the release of nuclear energy. If the star’s core is large enough it will breakdown and become a supernova. Most observations of a supernova are made through spectral lines. Classification agrees with the physical classification, because large stars are made of mostly hydrogen, while white dwarf stars are plain. White dwarfs have a bare surrounding because the original star’s explosion was so great that the winds pushed the hydrogen away.
Many people who live on Earth are close minded to what is really out there in the universe. They cannot even begin to fathom the vastness of it and how Earth is just a tiny little speck compared to everything else out there. From the planets to the stars and out towards the edge of the unknown, we can only see what science provides us with. From this, we know that we are nothing but a tiny planet located in a solar system of millions in a galaxy of many more in the universe.
One thing us as humans have never been able to fully understand is astronomy. Always having an unexplained mystery, astronomy also has served as a way to keep time and predict the future. The word “astronomy” is defined as the study of heavenly bodies, meaning anything in the sky such as stars, galaxies, comets, planets, nebulae, and so on. Many people, if not everyone, is amazed by the night sky on a clear, moonless night.
The idea behind the Solar Nebular Hypothesis is that the solar system was condensed from an enormous cloud of hydrogen, helium, and a few other elements and rocks. Around five billion years this cloud of materials began to spin and contract together into a disk shape under their own gravitational forces. The particles started combined together, protoplanets, to eventually form planets. A great mass of the material eventually began to form together, protosun, and make up the sun.