What Is A Gamma-ray Burst?

Tyler Joseph and Josh Dun playing hide and seek

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Interstellar (2014)

Traveling across more than seven Midwestern states with a professional storm-chasing group, photographer Eric Meola documents everything from hair-raising tornadoes to serene sunsets in his project ‘Tornado Alley: The Sky Above the Land Below.’ While the deadly force of a storm can wreak havoc upon a community, he hopes his work reminds the safety-conscientious observer that there is another side to these storms. “You are miles away from the nearest town and you are looking at these beautiful, flat horizons with endless wheat fields, long roads and dramatic rolling hills,” Meola tells TIME. “Then in all of the peacefulness comes this angry sky that is almost exploding with energy and light, form and shape. Nature truly is beautiful.” Photograph by Eric Meola. Read more at lightbox.time.com and see a behind the scenes picture @timelightbox. http://ift.tt/1Kvla1j

The Milky Way from Yosemite, CA

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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

Gravitational distortions caused by a Black Hole in front of the Large Magellanic Cloud. Nine Facts about Black Holes 1. The gravitational pull of a Black Hole can greatly slow down Time itself, according to Relativity. If you could take a spaceship to a Black Hole, Orbit around it for awhile, and then fly back to Earth, you would have successfully traveled to the Future. 2. Some equations suggest that every Black Hole contains a Universe - which would mean our Universe is inside a Black Hole right now. 3. While Black Holes are most definitely Real, they have theoretical opposites called White Holes, which would endlessly spew Matter into the Universe. They were thought to be purely hypothetical, but an unusual Gamma Ray burst observed in 2006 is turning out to be a potential candidate for a real-life White Hole. 4. Supermassive Black Holes likely exist at the Centers of most Galaxies. And since Galaxies sometimes collide, that means Black Holes do too, and when that happens, it’s thought that one Black Hole ‘kicks’ the other out of the Galaxy. 5. Black Holes are Black because their Gravity is so strong that not even Light can escape. But they do emit Radiation, usually called Hawking Radiation, after Stephen Hawking, who first theorized its Existence. 6. The Milky Way has a Supermassive Black Hole in its Center, and it seems to have exploded about 2 million years ago in an event known as a Seyfert Flare. The Radiation from the Black Hole would have been 100 million times more powerful than it is now; the Explosion may have even been visible from Earth. 7. Black Holes can emit Material at nearly the Speed of Light. Using an array of radio Telescopes, a team of scientists looked at a Galaxy 1.5 billion light-years from Earth and found a Black Hole doing just that. The jet is so Powerful that it’s blowing Gas right out of the Galaxy. 8. Black Holes are the densest Objects in Existence. If you made a Black Hole with the Mass of the entire Earth, the Black Hole would be 9 millimeters across. 9. Black Holes can form when Stars collapse in on themselves after Death. They keep growing by eating the Dust and Gas around them. No one’s really sure how the biggest ones, called Supermassive Black Holes, are born.

Death and Rebirth

On July 4, 1054 A.D, a bright new star appeared in the sky. Although it was 6,500 light-years away from Earth, it shone brighter than whole galaxies and was visible in daylight for 23 days. Little did the astronomers of the day know, the “new” star was actually the violent death of an old star: a supernova explosion. Stars more than ten times the mass of our sun will eventually become supernovas when they die. For their whole lives, they battle to balance energy trying to get out and gravity trying to crush them in under their own weight—but when they run out of fuel to burn, gravity wins. The star’s core collapses and its very atoms are crushed, emitting an enormous shockwave that flings heavy elements out into space. The remnants of this particular supernova formed the enigmatic Crab Nebula, an energetic cloud spanning five light-years, with each different colour representing different chemicals: orange is hydrogen, red is nitrogen, green is oxygen… And at the centre of the nebula lies the remnant of the exploded star. Gravity has squashed all the empty space out of it, leaving an incredibly dense object called a neutron star—just 20 km across, but with the mass of our sun, so on Earth, one teaspoonful would weigh one billion tons. Rotating neutron stars are known as pulsars, and this one spins at a rate of 30 times per second, sending out violent jets of particles at nearly the speed of light.

(Image Credit: 1, 2)

Barris Custom “Hover Car”The XPAK 400