Sunday, May 1, 2016
Sunday Science Blog
The brilliant flash of an exploding star’s shockwave—what astronomers call the “shock breakout” -- is illustrated in this cartoon animation. The animation begins with a view of a red supergiant star that is 500 times bigger and 20,000 brighter than our sun.
When the star’s internal furnace can no longer sustain nuclear fusion its core to collapses under gravity.
A shockwave from the implosion rushes upward through the star’s layers. The shockwave initially breaks through the star’s visible surface as a series of finger-like plasma jets.
Only 20 minute later the full fury of the shockwave reaches the surface and the doomed star blasts apart as a supernova explosion.
This animation is based on photometric observations made by NASA’s Kepler space telescope.
By closely monitoring the star KSN 2011d, located 1.2 billion light-years away, Kepler caught the onset of the early flash and subsequent explosion.
Understanding the physics of these violent events allows scientists to better understand how the seeds of chemical complexity and life itself have been scattered in space and time in our Milky Way galaxy
"All heavy elements in the universe come from supernova explosions. For example, all the silver, nickel, and copper in the earth and even in our bodies came from the explosive death throes of stars," said Steve Howell, project scientist for NASA's Kepler and K2 missions at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley. "Life exists because of supernovae."
We are most assuredly star people, made from the heavy elements left over from super novae.
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3 comments:
Actually, every element other than hydrogen exists only because of ancient stellar explosions. The only kind of atom that can form in deep space under normal conditions is a combination of a single proton and an electron -- a hydrogen atom. Any other type of atomic nucleus involves combining multiple protons, which can be forced together only under conditions of extreme pressure and heat -- conditions which, in nature, exist only inside stars. Every atom of every such element -- helium, carbon, oxygen, all of them -- must have formed inside a star billions of years ago. There's no other natural way for such atoms to exist. And the only way they could be released into space, later to form planets and everything on them, was by stellar explosions.
So yes, everything in us, other than the hydrogen atoms in the water molecules inside us, owes its existence to ancient stellar processes.
Reaching into his pockets to pay his bar bill, a hydrogen atom says: "OMG, I lost my electron!"
The bar keep asks: "Are you sure?"
The hydrogen atom replies: "I'm positive!"
A neutron walked into a bar and asked, "How much for a gin and tonic?" The bartender smiled wryly and replied, "For you, no charge."
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