Astronomers Found A Star Inside A Star, 40 Years After It Was First Theorized

Aboard the International Space Station this morning, Astronaut Kimiya Yui of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) successfully captured JAXA’s Kounotori 5 H-II Transfer Vehicle (HTV-5) at 6:28 a.m. EDT.

Yui commanded the station’s robotic arm, Canadarm2, to reach out and grapple the HTV-5, while NASA astronauts Kjell Lindgren provided assistance and Scott Kelly monitored HTV-5 systems. The HTV-5 launched aboard an H-IIB rocket at 7:50 a.m. Wednesday, Aug. 19, from the Tanegashima Space Center in southern Japan. Since then, the spacecraft has performed a series of engine burns to fine-tune its course for arrival at the station.

The HTV-5 is delivering more than 8,000 pounds of equipment, supplies and experiments in a pressurized cargo compartment. The unpressurized compartment will deliver the 1,400-pound CALorimetric Electron Telescope (CALET) investigation, an astrophysics mission that will search for signatures of dark matter and provide the highest energy direct measurements of the cosmic ray electron spectrum.

Below is a breathtaking image shared by Astronaut Scott Kelly of the HTV-5 and Canadarm2, which reached out and grappled the cargo spacecraft.

Neutron Star by Adolf Schaller from the book Extraterrestrials (1994)

brigitte bardot, 1960s

Stars come in all shapes, colors and SIZES!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEheh1BH34Q

http://www.sbau.org/planets.htm

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Star_Chart.jpg

631 Exposures Blended - Cloverdale, CA

js

1946 inflation in Hungary.

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.”

“I liked them before they were famous”

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)