Everything in the world dies, even stars. A supernova occurs when a star “dies.” A supernova is the explosion of a star. These explosions release huge amounts of energy, an amount equivalent to a few octillion nuclear warheads, or one million tons of TNT. One supernova will radiate more energy that our son will its entire lifetime. Supernovae play a huge part in the galaxy by being a primary source of heavy elements in the universe Throughout a large stars life, they create heavy elements within their core. When one of these stars star explodes, it releases the heavy elements into the galaxy. The elements then disperse and move on to create new stars and the cycle continues anew.
Supernovae occur when a star can no longer resist the force of gravity and collapse. There are two types of supernovae. Type II supernovae have hydrogen absorption lines in their light spectrum. Type II supernovae occur in stars with masses much greater than our sun. They are an implosion-explosion event. During fusion, outward pressure is created to balance the inward pull of gravity. However once the star runs out of fuel, the star will expand into a red supergiant. While the star is still a red supergiant, the core become hotter and denser. During this time more nuclear reactions occur, delaying the collapse of the core. However once the core is out of fuel this time, it has nothing left to fuse and the core collapses. The implosions, or collapse, of the iron cores of massive stars are caused from extreme pressure. When the core collapses, the core will rise to over 100 billion degrees. The energy from the iron crushing together will be overcome by gravity at first, but will bounce back through the layers of the star. When it reached the hydrogen envelope of the star, it explodes and a shock wave occurs. Many heavy elements are released by the explosion and are dispersed throughout the galaxy to form new stars
Type I supernovae, lack hydrogen in their line spectra. These types of supernovae exhibit a sharp maxima in their light curves, then gradually dies away. There are three subclasses of type I, Ia, Ib, and Ic. In type Ia, the white dwarf star has a companion star in a binary system. The stars must be close enough where the red giant’s material may flow into the white dwarf.
Starting with black holes, Khalili describes the creation of one. I found that a black hole is what remains when a massive star dies. Because stars are so massive and made out of gas, there is an intense gravitational field that is always trying to collapse the star. As the star dies, the nuclear fusion reactions stop because the fuel for these reactions gets burned up. At the same time, the star's gravity pulls material inward and compresses the core. As the core compresses, it heats up and eventually creates a supernova explosion in which the material and radiation blasts out into space. What remains is the highly compressed and extremely massive core. The core's gravity is so strong that even light cannot escape. This object is now a black hole and literally cannot be seen because of the absence of light. Because the core's gravity is so strong, the core sinks through the fabric of space-time, creating a hole in space-time. The core becomes the central part of the black hole called the singularity. The opening of the hole is called the event horizon. Khalili describes that there are two different kinds of black holes:
Brown dwarfs are objects in space that sit between the lines of being a star and a planet. This object is dim and hard to distinguish from low mass stars at the early stages of the dwarf’s life. They are often called failed stars because they start their life the same way as regular stars. However, in some stage, they just didn’t have enough mass gathered to generate the fusion-powered energy of a star. Scientists are certain that brown dwarfs are the missing link between stars and planets but the formations of dwarfs are still a mystery.
Stars explode at the end of their lifetime, sometimes when they explode the stars leave a remnant of gasses and, dust behind. What the gasses come together to form depend on the size of the remnant. If the remnant is less than 1.4 solar masses it will become a white dwarf, a hot dead star that is not bright enough to shine. If the remnant is roughly 1.4 solar masses, it will collapse. “The protons and electrons will be squashed together, and their elementary particles will recombine to form neutrons”. What results from this reaction is called a neut...
The Orion Nebula is an emission nebula because of the O-type and B-type stars contained within it. These high-temperature stars emit ultraviolet (UV) light that ionizes the surrounding hydrogen atoms into protons (H+) and electrons (e-). When the protons and electrons recombine, the electrons enter a higher energy level (n=3). Then, when the electron drops from the n=3 level to the n=2 level, an Hphoton is emitted. 2 This photon has a wavelength of 6563 Å, and therefore corresponds to the red portion of the visible spectrum. It is these H photons which give the nebula the distinctive red color which we see.
A white dwarf uses electron degeneracy pressure to support itself. It is because of the electron degeneracy pressure that white dwarfs have a small size relative to other types of stars.
Stars are born in the interstellar clouds of gas and dust called nebulae that are primarily found in the spiral arms of galaxies. These clouds are composed mainly of hydrogen gas but also contain carbon, oxygen and various other elements, but we will see that the carbon and oxygen play a crucial role in star formation so they get special mention. A nebula by itself is not enough to form a star however, and it requires the assistance of some outside force. A close passing star or a shock wave from a supernova or some other event can have just the needed effect. It is the same idea as having a number of marbles on a trampoline and then rolling a larger ball through the middle of them or around the edges. The marbles will conglomerate around the path of the ball, and as more marbles clump together, still more will be attracted. This is essentially what happens during the formation of a star (Stellar Birth, 2004).
A star begins as nothing more than a very light distribution of interstellar gases and dust particles over a distance of a few dozen lightyears. Although there is extremely low pressure existing between stars, this distribution of gas exists instead of a true vacuum. If the density of gas becomes larger than .1 particles per cubic centimeter, the interstellar gas grows unstable. Any small deviation in density, and because it is impossible to have a perfectly even distribution in these clouds this is something that will naturally occur, and the area begins to contract. This happens because between about .1 and 1 particles per cubic centimeter, pressure gains an inverse relationship with density. This causes internal pressure to decrease with increasing density, which because of the higher external pressure, causes the density to continue to increase. This causes the gas in the interstellar medium to spontaneously collect into denser clouds. The denser clouds will contain molecular hydrogen (H2) and interstellar dust particles including carbon compounds, silicates, and small impure ice crystals. Also, within these clouds, there are 2 types of zones. There are H I zones, which contain neutral hydrogen and often have a temperature around 100 Kelvin (K), and there are H II zones, which contain ionized hydrogen and have a temperature around 10,000 K. The ionized hydrogen absorbs ultraviolet light from it’s environment and retransmits it as visible and infrared light. These clouds, visible to the human eye, have been named nebulae. The density in these nebulae is usually about 10 atoms per cubic centimeter. In brighter nebulae, there exists densities of up to several thousand atoms per cubic centimete...
The Big Bang, the alpha of existence for the building blocks of stars, happened approximately fourteen billion years ago. The elements produced by the big bang consisted of hydrogen and helium with trace amounts of lithium. Hydrogen and helium are the essential structure which build stars. Within these early stars, heavier elements were slowly formed through a process known as nucleosynthesis. Nucleosythesis is the process of creating new atomic nuclei from pre-existing nucleons. As the stars expel their contents, be it going supernova, solar winds, or solar explosions, these heavier elements along with other “star stuff” are ejected into the interstellar medium where they will later be recycled into another star. This physical process of galactic recycling is how or solar system's mass came to contain 2% of these heavier elements.
Supernovas are extremely powerful explosions of radiation. A supernova can give off as much energy as a Sun can within its whole life. A star will release most of its material when it undergoes this type of explosion. The explosion of a supernova can also help in creating new stars.
The idea behind the Solar Nebular Hypothesis is that the solar system was condensed from an enormous cloud of hydrogen, helium, and a few other elements and rocks. Around five billion years this cloud of materials began to spin and contract together into a disk shape under their own gravitational forces. The particles started combined together, protoplanets, to eventually form planets. A great mass of the material eventually began to form together, protosun, and make up the sun.
After World War II the country of Czechoslovakia was suffering at the hands of the decision to accept the US Marshall Plan or submit to the Soviets and become and communist state. The majority of eastern central Europe was threatened into becoming members of the Soviet regime and thus turned into Communist states. At the beginning of the 1950’s after Czechoslovakia had become a fully Communist State, the living situation and daily life had changed for the worse and we can see these effects in the books, The Joke and Life Under a Cruel Star. In Kundera’s book we follow the life of the young man named Jahn and get a glimpse at what life was like in a communist state on both the good and bad sides of the party. Daily life in a communist
34 Cygni- Hypergiant luminous blue star which is rare and only found in places with intense star formation. Are Usually short lived because of
Many people who live on Earth are close minded to what is really out there in the universe. They cannot even begin to fathom the vastness of it and how Earth is just a tiny little speck compared to everything else out there. From the planets to the stars and out towards the edge of the unknown, we can only see what science provides us with. From this, we know that we are nothing but a tiny planet located in a solar system of millions in a galaxy of many more in the universe.
With Dark Nebulae containing large amounts of gas and dust, they provide perfect conditions for stars to form. As the clumps of gas become more dense they begin to pull in surrounding objects with their own gravity. This ball, containing merely dust and gas, continues to condense, causing heat to build in its centre. Now it begins a long process of growing in size and energy until the core temperature is strong enough to form a star. From this point it can take up to 100,000,000 years for it to reach its required energy and be classified as a star, after which it will only lasts a few million years.
One thing us as humans have never been able to fully understand is astronomy. Always having an unexplained mystery, astronomy also has served as a way to keep time and predict the future. The word “astronomy” is defined as the study of heavenly bodies, meaning anything in the sky such as stars, galaxies, comets, planets, nebulae, and so on. Many people, if not everyone, is amazed by the night sky on a clear, moonless night.