Cosmic rays are incredibly powerful invisible particles, and we can’t be sure where they come from. Not much in the way of a comforting thought, but it makes for a cosmic mystery that astronomers have been trying to solve for decades. And now they have come one step closer. Here’s what we do know. Cosmic rays are energetic atomic nuclei travelling at near the speed of light. They hit our atmosphere and rapidly interact with the molecules there to break into billions of smaller, less energetic particles that shower down on the life on Earth, without giving us much notice...
The elements that make up our world and our selves, where do they come from? Sure there is plenty of Oxygen in the air, Silicon and Carbon are just lying around, and a bunch of other stuff can be found across our planet. but where did they come from originally? We know that most of the elements are synthesized within stars, but which ones aren’t? Which ones are made in a lab? The Big Bang gave rise to the first elements Hydrogen and Helium, which eventually clumped together to form the first stars and star producing the heavier stuff. Lithium,...
We just saw it. Another record breaker. This incredible explosion of a massive dying star is the brightest supernova ever observed. You may think you get how big this explosion was, but it was brighter than collective brightness of all the 400 Billion stars in the Milky Way. You may be asking why you can’t see it in the sky. Well even though it is incredibly bright, it is 3.8 Billion light years away in a distant galaxy, so the discovery needed a huge telescope. It may have been powered by a rare star called a magnetar, a star with such an...
Massive stars and low-mass stars live different lives. They are born in different environments, fuse different elements during the course of their lives, release different amounts of radiation across the electromagnetic spectrum, die in different ways, and enrich interstellar space with different metals. We see stars at all stages of life in the galaxy, and their study allows us to piece together how stars form, and how the rarest ones are different. The image above shows two distinct clouds, both about 5,000 light years away in the constellation Cygnus, along the Galactic plane. The smaller bubble on the left, literally...
In Canis Major, nearly 12,000 light years from Earth, lies an emission nebula that always makes me think of a particular comic book character. NGC 2359 is 30 light years across, and is colloquially known as Thor’s Helmet. The complex structure of Thor’s helmet consists of bubbles and filaments, and is due to a series of bursts from the massive star HD 56925. This star is a rare Wolf-Rayet star, which consistently expels its outer layers of gas at high velocities, and is characterized by its very high temperature. The blue bubble in the above image is a result of...
