Favorite Movies Meme: 1/? Interstellar (2014)
“Maybe it means something more - something we can’t yet understand. Maybe it’s some evidence, some artifact of a higher dimension that we can’t consciously perceive. I’m drawn across the universe to someone I haven’t seen in a decade, who I know is probably dead. Love is the one thing we’re capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space. Maybe we should trust that, even if we can’t understand it.”
Here’s something for you to start the week off with a bang. This is a computer simulation of a supernova event, the moments when a massive star collapses in on itself to evolve into a neutron star. The violent and knobbly shock wave from the collapse expands out in a fraction of a second, with the coldest gas in the model colored blue and the hottest colored red. Ejected stellar material moves away from the core at speeds that can reach almost 19,000 miles per second.
The simulation was created in 2012 by the Simulating eXtreme Spacetimes (SXS) Project. Now, direct observations of a supernova called 1987A using NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array has confirmed a detail found in the model–that the collapse leads to a lopsided ejection of debris in one direction and the stellar core into another.
Read more from Caltech about how models predicted that perfectly spherical star cores evolve into asymmetric blobs with plumes of broiling hot gasses powered by neutrino emissions.
(Hubble Space Telescope captured supernova 1987A with a bright ring of material ejected from the dying star before it detonated. The ring is being lit up by the explosion’s shock wave.Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA.)
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brigitte bardot, 1960s
1967 - Teen Dance Party
The Milky Way from Yosemite, CA
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Gargantua
It’s Red, White and Blue stars month!
This week’s entry: Life of a star Part 2
http://www.schoolsobservatory.org.uk/astro/stars/lifecycle
Forever yawning.
Hats, 1951. William Heick.