Here’s something for you to start the week off with a bang. This is a computer simulation of a supernova event, the moments when a massive star collapses in on itself to evolve into a neutron star. The violent and knobbly shock wave from the collapse expands out in a fraction of a second, with the coldest gas in the model colored blue and the hottest colored red. Ejected stellar material moves away from the core at speeds that can reach almost 19,000 miles per second.
The simulation was created in 2012 by the Simulating eXtreme Spacetimes (SXS) Project. Now, direct observations of a supernova called 1987A using NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array has confirmed a detail found in the model–that the collapse leads to a lopsided ejection of debris in one direction and the stellar core into another.
Read more from Caltech about how models predicted that perfectly spherical star cores evolve into asymmetric blobs with plumes of broiling hot gasses powered by neutrino emissions.
(Hubble Space Telescope captured supernova 1987A with a bright ring of material ejected from the dying star before it detonated. The ring is being lit up by the explosion’s shock wave.Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA.)
Keep reading
It’s Red, White and Blue stars month!
This week’s entry: Life of a star Part 2
http://www.schoolsobservatory.org.uk/astro/stars/lifecycle
Favorite Movies Meme: 1/? Interstellar (2014)
“Maybe it means something more - something we can’t yet understand. Maybe it’s some evidence, some artifact of a higher dimension that we can’t consciously perceive. I’m drawn across the universe to someone I haven’t seen in a decade, who I know is probably dead. Love is the one thing we’re capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space. Maybe we should trust that, even if we can’t understand it.”
I was convinced these were mountains on Joy Division’s cover. *you learn something new every day*
1967 - Teen Dance Party
Gravitational distortions caused by a Black Hole in front of the Large Magellanic Cloud. Nine Facts about Black Holes 1. The gravitational pull of a Black Hole can greatly slow down Time itself, according to Relativity. If you could take a spaceship to a Black Hole, Orbit around it for awhile, and then fly back to Earth, you would have successfully traveled to the Future. 2. Some equations suggest that every Black Hole contains a Universe - which would mean our Universe is inside a Black Hole right now. 3. While Black Holes are most definitely Real, they have theoretical opposites called White Holes, which would endlessly spew Matter into the Universe. They were thought to be purely hypothetical, but an unusual Gamma Ray burst observed in 2006 is turning out to be a potential candidate for a real-life White Hole. 4. Supermassive Black Holes likely exist at the Centers of most Galaxies. And since Galaxies sometimes collide, that means Black Holes do too, and when that happens, it’s thought that one Black Hole ‘kicks’ the other out of the Galaxy. 5. Black Holes are Black because their Gravity is so strong that not even Light can escape. But they do emit Radiation, usually called Hawking Radiation, after Stephen Hawking, who first theorized its Existence. 6. The Milky Way has a Supermassive Black Hole in its Center, and it seems to have exploded about 2 million years ago in an event known as a Seyfert Flare. The Radiation from the Black Hole would have been 100 million times more powerful than it is now; the Explosion may have even been visible from Earth. 7. Black Holes can emit Material at nearly the Speed of Light. Using an array of radio Telescopes, a team of scientists looked at a Galaxy 1.5 billion light-years from Earth and found a Black Hole doing just that. The jet is so Powerful that it’s blowing Gas right out of the Galaxy. 8. Black Holes are the densest Objects in Existence. If you made a Black Hole with the Mass of the entire Earth, the Black Hole would be 9 millimeters across. 9. Black Holes can form when Stars collapse in on themselves after Death. They keep growing by eating the Dust and Gas around them. No one’s really sure how the biggest ones, called Supermassive Black Holes, are born.