Supernova Brightness
The universe has many components that make what it is throughout the years. The universe is composed of the galaxies which contain billions of stars, the planets from Mercury to Pluto, the Moon, and many other numerous objects. The universe is complex as it is, and no one knows where it begins or where it ends. The stars in the universe, the Sun included, vary in size and brightness depending on the distance viewed from, and its real or apparent visual magnitude. The stars are enormous heavenly bodies that are luminous, and their components are held tightly together by gravity. The stars are often grouped together in constellations; these were the stars that were readily visible by the earliest stargazers, and were not blocked by the various heavenly bodies. Supernovas are stars that have exploded in a violent fashion, thus changing their shape and brightness in the night sky, and forever leaving their scar in the universe.
There are a number of stars in the universe whose count is infinite and no one can configure the exact amount. Stars in the universe vary from each other by existence in constellations such as Orion, the plough, the great south and Leo among many others. The stars also vary in size with the biggest stars being the Eta Carinae and the dwarfs, and the smaller ones like the Sun (Seeds, 14). Others vary in the system in which they rotate: temperature, their magnetic field, chemical composition and radius are just to name a few. The brightness of stars is determined by the luminosity which refers to the light contained therein. To determine the brightness of a star the factors of the temperature of its surface t, and its radius length r, must be calculated (Clark, 98).
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Vera Cooper Rubin was born July 23, 1928 in Philadelphia, PA. Her father was Philip Cooper, an electrical engineer, and her mother Rose. She first developed an interest in astronomy at the age of 10 while stargazing from her home in Washington D.C. Her father encouraged her to follow her dreams and took her to amateur astronomer meetings. She earned her Bachelor’s degree from Vassar University in 1948 of which she was the only astronomy major that year. Later she earned her master’s from Cornell in 1950 with her masters’ thesis was controversial and centered around the possibility of bulk rotation by looking for “sideways” motion of galaxies. She finally got her Ph.D. from Georgetown University in 1954. Her doctoral thesis was on the clustering of galaxies and how she describes the definite clumping and not random distribution throughout the sky. She had attempted to enroll in Princeton for her master’s degree, but at the time women were not allowed in the graduate astronomy program. She was married in 1948 to Robert Rubin and has four children all with Doctorate degrees.
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Stars are born and reborn from an explosion of a previous star. The particles and helium are brought together the same way the last star was born. Throughout the life of a star, it manages to avoid collapsing. The gravitational pull from the core of the star has to equal the gravitational pull of the gasses, which form a type of orbit. When this equality is broken, the star can go into several different stages. Some stars that are at least thirty times larger than our sun can form black holes and other kinds of stars.
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Perhaps one of the most interesting features of our fathomless universe are the planets that are classified as gas giants. Huge, turbulent, and distant, the gas giants are some of the most enigmatic features in our Solar System. I have a personal interest to the gas giants and celestial bodies in general. When I was a child, I was fascinated by our Solar System. I read innumerable books about space, and my interests of outer space had been piqued further by other forms of media. Although I held this interest of space, growing up left me with little time to learn about space, and I lost interest for a while. Taking Earth Science in Milpitas High re-invigorated my interests in the celestial bodies. Using this class, I’m now able to focus on learning more about our colossal universe, in particular, the outer planets.
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Our sun is the central pivot point to which or entire planet and solar system is built around. With out it all life on our planet would cease to exist. Within this paper we will explore how our Sun and solar system formed and came to resemble what we see today.
Supernovas are extremely powerful explosions of radiation. A supernova can give off as much energy as a Sun can within its whole life. A star will release most of its material when it undergoes this type of explosion. The explosion of a supernova can also help in creating new stars.
The first person to ever observe the Milky Way was Greek philosopher, Democritus, who said the galaxy may consist of distant stars. In 1610, Galileo Galilei used a telescope to study the Milky Way and came to the conclusion that it was composed of billions and billions of faint stars. Then, in 1750, Thomas Wright c...
The Universe is a collection of millions of galaxies and extends beyond human imagination. After the big bang, the universe was found to be composed of radiation and subatomic particles. Information following big bang is arguable on how galaxies formed, that is whether small particles merged to form clusters and eventually galaxies or whether the universe systematized as immense clumps of matter that later fragmented into galaxies (Nasa World book, 2013). A galaxy is a massive area of empty space full of dust, gases (mainly 75% Hydrogen and 25%Helium), atoms, about 100-200 billion stars, interstellar clouds and planets, attracted to the center by gravitational force of attraction. Based on recent research, 170 billion galaxies have been estimated to exist, with only tens of thousands been discovered (Deutsch, 2011).