If you listen to an astronomer talk about a supernova, you’ll probably hear something along the lines of ‘A massive explosion of a massive star that is bright enough to outshine an entire galaxy.’ You can imagine how bright it might be, but it doesn’t really give you enough context to get the wow factor from it. Carl Sagan always said ‘When you make the finding yourself – even if you’re the last person on Earth to see the light – you’ll never forget it.’ Now you, dear reader, have the chance to make the discovery yourself. A series of images of galaxy...
How do stars lose mass? For a star like the Sun, it shoots out a swath of charged particles into space and sheds mass at a rate of 4 million tons per second! Though even at this rate, the Sun only loses 1% of its total mass every 160 Billion years, so it’s not disappearing anytime soon. For more massive stars, the process can become complex and strange. The red hypergiant VY Canis Majoris, one of the largest known stars, is about 40 times as massive as the Sun, but humungous in scale. If this star were to replace the...
One of the greatest scientific discoveries of all time came with the invention of the spectroscope by Joseph Von Fraunhofer in 1814. It enabled us to look out at the universe and realize that the same basic building blocks that made you and I and all other life, were the same things that make up everything else in the cosmos. The tiny atoms in our bodies all started out at the center of a massive star billions of years ago. So naturally, when we talk about the odds of life forming elsewhere, we have to include a study of where...
Type 1a supernova explosions are used by Astronomers as a standard candle for measuring distances in Astronomy. They all explode with the same intrinsic brightness, and so depending on their apparent magnitude, ie how bright they look, we can determine the distance to them. It’s like a 40 watt light bulb. No matter how far away I move it, it’s still 40 watts, even though it looks dimmer if it’s further away. However, a few months ago some research came forward about type 1a supernova explosions, hinting that there may actually be two or more distinct types with slightly different...
