Bloating in old age to become red giants;their cores contracting into white dwarves; The most massive ones exploding as supernovae; Fleeing the elements they have created, out into space to form the materials for the next generation of stars. But tha...
An implosion that launches an explosion creating enough heat and energy to forge almost all the other elements.The supernova explosion is able to produce some of the very rare elements heavier than iron, the zinc, the gold, the platinum, the silver,...
And with his colleagues, he did the calculations to prove it. The key was the conditions created in the final stages about massive stars fighting against its gravity. These stars are so massive and hot that they can go through a whole series of nucle...
And so i can see that there is hydrogen being produced by the supernova, and over here the yellow orange light is due to glowing atoms of sodium, it's the same sodium glow that we saw when I sprinkled the chemical into the fire, these ones here in th...
The supernovae that Alex photographs are hundreds of millions of light years away. The only reason that he can photograph them so distinctly is because there are such colossal explosions. And appreciating the power of a supernova's explosion has been...
And takes dedication perseverance and a love of the thrill of the chase, not just any kind of astronomer but a supernovae hunter, and one with perfect timing.You know usually nothing much happens in astronomy, stars live for millions or billions of y...
The enigma of the white dwarf has been resolved. Scientists have discovered how the vast majority of the stars, including our own sun, would end their days, as the white dwarfs gently fading into the darkness of the universe. But not all stars go so...
Thats why what we physicists called pressure. This pressure is created as the particles jostle for position. Its a principle of Quantum Mechanics and when it was applying to stars, the lives of dead white dwarfs suddenly made sense. What stopped them...
Once the fusion stops, the whole thing collapses under its own weight to form a white dwarf, so you got this very small blob which is incredibly dense, it's going to be something like a million times denser than it started off, so dense in fact that...
This tiny companion to the bright Dog Star, was dubbed the pup. And by 1922, this new type of the star had an official classification. It was called a white dwarf. But naming it was the least of scientists problems. When they compared its size to its...
