Alliteration is accessible to all! Okay I’m done. Start some science! Really done this time. Today’s double post covers the smallest of stars, still larger than most planets, and the only weather Mercury will ever have. Humans are naturally interested in the extremes, the biggest, smallest, fastest, hottest, coldest, and every other characteristic outlier. With stars, being so huge and powerful, we are often more interested in the largest, hottest, and most energetic. Though on the opposite end of the spectrum, Cambridge University astronomers have discovered the smallest star in the known universe. The star, a red dwarf, has the...
Mercury crossed the face of the Sun this past Monday, a relatively rare event that occurs only a dozen (give or take) times a century. Being able to see it in real time was excellent, but seeing the photos taken by professionals and amateurs alike made the event truly memorable. And look! The International Space Station flew by. Compare this to 2012’s transit of Venus and you get a sense of how much closer to Venus the Earth is than Mercury. In both cases, the most beautiful thing is that you get a sense of just how immense and powerful...
The gravitational center of most objects and clusters in the universe are the place where the most massive and high energy interactions take place. For the solar system, the Sun’s core is hot and energetic. For star clusters, central regions host the most massive and brightest stars. For galaxy clusters, the most massive galaxies in the universe are seen in the center. And for individual galaxies, the Milky Way included, the core is where the fun happens. In the core of our galaxy, there are many massive and powerful objects, not limited to a supermassive star cluster, pulsars, supernova remnants,...
Gamma rays are the most powerful form of electromagnetic radiation in the universe. With wavelengths as small at atoms, they usually result from the most powerful interactions known, such as the collision of two particles, or the release of energy from the accretion disk of a black hole. But there is another potential source of gamma rays that has not yet been confirmed: Dark Matter. The leading candidate for dark matter is the theorized Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP), though it is not as wimpy as its namesake suggests, making up 5 times as much mass as the visible matter...
Predicting the death of a star is easy. If we know how massive it is, and what stage of life it’s in, we know that it should explode eventually, within a set timeframe of many hundreds of thousands, or even millions of years. But on human timescales, that is just not good enough. What if we could predict a supernova explosion within a few months? For something that lives for so long, this would be a triumph in our understanding of the universe. Over the past couple of years, this is exactly what happened. Here’s how. A supernova is one of the most...
I was with my friend and fellow astronomer Jesse Rogerson discussing the fantastic book from xkcd author Randall Munroe, called What if? We were talking about the brilliant analogy used by Munroe when talking about how big a supernova is. The questions asked was “Which of the following is brighter, in terms of the amount of energy delivered to your retina?” 1. A supernova, seen from 150 Million Kilometers, about as far as the Sun is from Earth. 2. The detonation of a Hydrogen Bomb, pressed against your eyeball. What a great question. The answer, surprisingly, is the Supernova, which is...
