Tag: Outflow

Building Blocks of Everything, Everywhere

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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...

Massive Star Seen Forming in Real Time

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On the York Universe radio show this past Monday evening on astronomy.fm, I was having a discussion with another host about how so many things in Astronomy can take Millions or even Billions of years, yet there are still all kinds of phenomena that happen in seconds, hours, weeks, years, or on the scale of human lifetimes.  Stars live for hundreds of Millions of years at the low end, yet the intense brightening from the Supernova death of a massive star lasts for only a few days or weeks.  It’s as if the Universe is piquing our interest with short...