Stars
Category archives for Stars
Giving thanks for our place in the Universe
Posted by Ethan on November 21, 2012 
“We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinions, of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins.” -George Bernard Shaw All that is real about ourselves is nothing…
Messier Monday: An Ancient Globular Cluster, M15
Posted by Ethan on November 12, 2012 
“When your friends begin to flatter you on how young you look, it’s a sure sign you’re getting old.” -Mark Twain Welcome to yet another installment of Messier Monday, where each week, I’ll pick one of the 110 Messier Objects — deep-sky objects catalogued to avoid confusion for comet hunters — to highlight for you. So far,…
Where do Type Ia Supernovae come from?
Posted by Ethan on November 8, 2012 
“You have to have a canon so the next generation can come along and explode it.” -Henry Louis Gates When it comes to stars, their fates are very well known. Every single star that’s massive enough to fuse hydrogen into helium in its core will someday run out of fuel and die. The very brightest…
Every Galaxy will have New Stars for Trillions of Years!
Posted by Ethan on November 7, 2012 
“It’s a brilliant surface in that sunlight.” – Neil Armstrong Indeed, all that glitters so brilliantly in the cosmos does so because of the stars that have formed throughout it. Over the 14 billion-or-so years that our Universe has been around, we’ve formed hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy alone. Given that our…
Messier Monday: The Lagoon Nebula, M8
Posted by Ethan on November 5, 2012 
“I hate that expression, ‘fusion.’ What it means to me is this movement where nothing ever really fused.” -Wayne Kramer Welcome to another Messier Monday, where each week, I pick one of the 110 Messier Objects — deep-sky objects catalogued to avoid confusion for comet hunters — to highlight and detail. This week, I’d like…
Messier Monday: The Pleiades, M45
Posted by Ethan on October 29, 2012 
“Something there is more immortal even than the stars, (Many the burials, many the days and nights, passing away,) Something that shall endure longer even than lustrous Jupiter, Longer than sun or any revolving satellite, Or the radiant sisters the Pleiades.” -Walt Whitman Last week, we kicked off our very first Messier Monday by spotlighting M1:…
What is the Sun made out of?
Posted by Ethan on October 24, 2012 
“The sun is a mass of incandescent gas A gigantic nuclear furnace Where hydrogen is built into helium At a temperature of millions of degrees” -They Might Be Giants It’s so ingrained in us that the Sun is a nuclear furnace powered by hydrogen atoms fusing into heavier elements that it’s difficult to remember that,…
At the end of their lives, stars glow hotter than ever!
Posted by Ethan on October 11, 2012 
“A colour is a physical object as soon as we consider its dependence, for instance, upon its luminous source, upon other colours, upon temperatures, upon spaces, and so forth.” -Ernst Mach Our Sun, like all Sun-like stars, will come to the end of its life someday. All the hydrogen fuel in its core will eventually…
The lives and deaths of Sun-like stars
Posted by Ethan on October 1, 2012 
“Man alone is born crying, lives complaining, and dies disappointed.” -Samuel Johnson But the stars, as opposed to humans, are born shining, with hundreds (or more) of brothers and sisters, shine ever more brightly over their lifetimes, and die in spectacular fashion. As far as we can tell, here’s the past, present and future story…
Behind the Galaxy’s Most Famous Nebula
Posted by Ethan on September 24, 2012 
“The self-same atoms which, chaotically dispersed, made the nebula, now, jammed and temporarily caught in peculiar positions, form our brains; and the ‘evolution’ of brains, if understood, would be simply the account of how the atoms came to be so caught and jammed.” -William James Up in the heavens, there are planets, stars, and galaxies…
