red giant
Tag archives for red giant
Messier Monday: A Lost-and-Found Star Cluster, M48
Posted by Ethan on February 11, 2013 
“Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life.” -Marcel Proust Welcome to another Messier Monday, where each week we take an in-depth look at one of the 110 deep sky objects that make up the Messier Catalogue! Messier was not the first person to try and make an accurate, large catalog of deep sky objects,…
Messier Monday: The Owl Nebula, M97
Posted by Ethan on January 28, 2013 
“A wise old owl lived in an oak The more he saw the less he spoke The less he spoke the more he heard. Why can’t we all be like that wise old bird?” -The Immortal Poet Bromley To your naked eye, the night sky appears littered with thousands of individual points of light: the…
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…
How to make a Black Hole
Posted by Ethan on February 6, 2008 You and I have lived on planet Earth long enough to know that if you want to launch something into space, it needs to travel fast enough to escape the pull of Earth’s gravity. Launch it with too slow of a speed, and it crashes back into Earth. Launch it with a little more speed,…
