The Earth Story

Let there be Light: The Making and Death of Stars

Hubble has spent nearly 30 years sending us the most amazing and dazzling photos of our Universe. Hubble has literally expanded the frontiers of human knowledge. Using it to peer deep into space and back in cosmic time, astronomers learned that galaxies formed from smaller patches of ‘stuff’ in the early universe by capturing light from newborn galaxies as it looked 13 billion years ago. The creation of this light is made from the billions of stars out there, illuminating our universe for all to see. How is this light created? How are stars made and what happens once they have used up all their energy? Lets take a brief look at the making and death of stars. First of all, some basic facts about our Sun. Our Sun is a G2 V type main sequence dwarf star (medium sized), at the center of the solar system and contains nearly 99.8% of the solar systems mass. The colour is whitey green but appears yellowish due to the scattering of blue light in the atmosphere. It is a population I star, that being rich in heavy elements, (high metallicity). The Sun was probably formed from a high proportion of material from prior supernova events (death of super massive stars way bigger than our own). Its composition is about 74% Hydrogen, 24% Helium, 0.8% Oxygen, 0.3% Carbon and 0.2% Iron. Its gravity is about 28 x the Earth’s and is about 150 million km (93 205 678.8 miles) away from Earth, or just over 8 light minutes.

Each star is different, but starts life the same way in clouds and dust called Nebulas, stellar nurseries for stars such as Orion, Eagle and Horse head to name but a few. To make a star, all you need is gravity, hydrogen and time. Gravity pulls the hydrogen gas into a swirling vortex. Gravity brings matter together and when you 'squeeze' things together in smaller spaces, they heat up, basically when you compress something you drive the temperature up. Over 100's and 1000's of years the cloud gets thicker, a large spinning vortex as big as our solar system and at the centre a large dense spinning ball where the pressure builds until large jets of gas burst out at the sides. Eventually a star ignites, throwing off any remainder gas out. With a temperature of 15 million degrees at the core, atoms of gas fuse together. BOOM! A star is born.

So, we now know how a star is created, what about what drives stars energy then? Atoms of Hydrogen smash into each other, this process is called fusion. Hydrogen atoms naturally repel one another, chemistry 101, but if they travel fast enough, really fast, they crash into each other, fusing together to make helium, heat with a small amount of pure energy. The hydrogen gas weighs slightly more than helium, loosing mass during the collision in which this mass turns into energy. Stars are huge, and to drive this you need gravity to compress the star to create nuclear fusion at its core.

What happens when the fuel runs out? Well, eventually it will run out, bigger stars use their fuel more quickly so the bigger the star the shorter its life. Gravity is in a constant battle with the stars fusion process that they balance each other out, however gravity eventually wins the battle. Our Sun is no exception, every second it burns 600million tones of its hydrogen fuel. As hydrogen gets used up, the core slows down giving gravity the edge, with less fusion pushing outward, gravity pushes inward and as fusion fights back the star begins to expand. This is called the red giant stage that will consumes all the inner rocky planets, and most likely even the Earth. This is the end of our beautiful planet Earth (although some theorists think that this process may ‘push’ Earth further out). With no hydrogen left to fuel it, the star starts to burn helium and fuses it with carbon. Blasting energy from its core to the surface, these energy waves blow away the stars outer layer and slowly it disintegrates into a “white dwarf”. A white dwarf is so dense that if a sugar cube amount were placed on Earth, it would fall right through it. Astronomers believe that in the core of a white dwarf there is solid carbon, literally a diamond in the sky!

This is the outcome of our star, but what about bigger ones? Larger stars have a much more violent ending than our G type star. The gravity of these stars is so massive that they can smash together bigger and bigger atoms. The cores of these stars are like factories, manufacturing heavier and heavier elements, which lead to the stars destruction. Gold, Silver, Nickel and other elements are all created in these stars. The next time you wear your gold chain or ring, just think, it wasn't created here on Earth, but in the death of a super massive nova. Once the star starts to make iron, this is the end. Iron absorbs the energy in a 1000th of a second, robbing it of its remaining fuel until gravity wins and the star collapses. It creates a huge explosion, a supernova and the single most violent event in the universe, spewing everything out into space. Then, the whole process of star formation begins again. If it wasn't for these massive explosions, our Sun wouldn't be here, therefore so wouldn't we.

There is only so much hydrogen in the universe and astronomers believe that eventually, the entire universe will simply run out of the star forming gas and eventually the lights will all go out. Thankfully, we will not be around to see this, nor see the death of our own middle-aged star in about 4.57 billion years. We have a long time to appreciate it and be thankful for its life giving ingredients. To be thankful that its rises, sets and rises again, because without it, it’s goodnight sweetheart smile emoticon

Carbon, Oxygen, Iron in our blood, Everything around us came from the belly of a star. We are in a 'golden age' of the universe. A good time to be here, seeing the best of all stages of the universe, filling the darkness with light. For we are all made of stardust.

~ JM

Image Credit: http://bit.ly/1FnZ8dV

More Info:

Hubble: http://hubblesite.org/

Sun Facts: http://bit.ly/1xqjsaz

NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory:http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/

Space Weather: http://www.spaceweather.com/

Encyclopaedia Britannica: http://bit.ly/1CiFOPI

Stellar Evolution: http://bit.ly/1BkXinG

Original caption:

I cannot tell you how this video was made, whether this is all computer generated or whether there is some Hubble telescope image on which some of this is based...but basically here is a chance to float around through 10 minutes of whispy nebular clouds and stars forming out in space.

New Insights Into the Crab Nebula

Five observatories teamed up to spy on the Crab Nebula and the results are incredible. The VLA (radio) views are shown in red; Spitzer Space Telescope (infrared) in yellow; Hubble Space Telescope (visible) in green; XMM-Newton (ultraviolet) in blue; and Chandra X-ray Observatory (X-ray) in purple. The Crab Nebula is the remnant of a bright supernova explosion first spotted by the Chinese in 1054. Located 6,500 light-years from Earth, the Nebula is home to a super-dense neutron star. The stellar powerhouse -- known as a pulsar and seen as a bright dot in the center of the image -- emits pulsing lighthouse-like beams of radio waves and light as it rotates (or pulses) once every 33 milliseconds.

The super-dense star does more that put on a dazzling display of stellar strobe lights, it also gives the nebula it's intricate shape. A fast-moving blast of particles emanating from the pulsar, combines with material ejected by the supernova explosion and its progenitor star, to form the distinctive shape we know as the Crab Nebula.

This incredible new video starts by showing us a composite image of the Crab Nebula, created by combining data from five observatories spanning nearly the entire breadth of the electromagnetic spectrum: the Very Large Array, the Spitzer Space Telescope, the Hubble Space Telescope, the XMM-Newton Observatory, and the Chandra X-ray Observatory.

From the image, the video dissolves to the red-colored radio-light view illustrating how a neutron star’s fierce “wind” of charged particles energizes the nebula, ultimately causing it to emit the radio waves. Next we see the yellow-colored infrared image from Spitzer, which shows the glow of dust particles absorbing ultraviolet and visible light. Then we see through Hubble's eyes as the green-colored visible-light image offers a sharp view of hot filaments that permeate this nebula. Lastly, we see the blue-colored ultraviolet image and the purple-colored X-ray image, which highlight the effect of an energetic cloud of electrons driven by a rapidly rotating neutron star at the center of the nebula.

Image & Source Credit: Credits: NASA, ESA, J. DePasquale (STScI)

https://youtu.be/ZiGuh0yISao

Our galactic neighbour, rising over the Italian Alps

The Andromeda galaxy is speeding towards ours at a large rate of knots, and in some 4 billion years the two galaxies will collide in a slow motion minuet that will ignite a huge burst of star formation in both island universes. At the moment it is still some 2.5 million light years away, but it is so bright it is visible to the naked eye as a light smudge if you know where to look and have a reasonably dark sky (in fact its visibility or lack thereof is a good test of what astronomers call 'seeing').

Also known as M31 (from a catalogue compiled by Charles Messier in the late 19th/early 19th centuries that was intended to mark these objects so that they would not be confused with comets), like our galaxy it is the largest in the local group and has some 16 satellite star clumps orbiting it. Our first recorded sighting dates from 965, when the Persian astronomer Abd al-Rahman al Sufi mentioned it in his Book of Fixed Stars (while mystics, the Sufi orders produced a lot of tomes of practical knowledge, from star charts and glassmaking to animal husbandry, mostly anonymously like we do here at TES). Early star charts label it as the little cloud. Galaxies were not proved to lie beyond our immediate neighbourhood until the 1920's, and the debate was settled by Erwin Hubble in 1925 when he identified a type of variable star with fixed properties called Cepheids that allow distances to be measured.

Loz

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Image credit: Matteo Dunchi

http://space-facts.com/andromeda/ http://bbc.in/1LgnNW5

Thanks to Slate’s stupid code this video won’t embed, but here’s a historical voyage through the photographs of Pluto taken over the years, from Clyde Tombaugh’s original 1920′s vintage photos to Hubble to New Horizons.

This is the 25th anniversary of the deployment of the Hubble Space Telescope that, after some early issues, fundamentally redefined astronomy and how humans view the universe in more ways than I can count. This page is mostly earth and occasionally planets-based. Hubble has viewed those some, but its done its greatest work farther away from Earth. Consequently, from an Earth Science based page, I think the best tribute I can give to the Hubble is this video of it viewed from Earth, as a tiny dot in the sky.

Let there be Light: The Making and Death of Stars

Hubble celebrates 25 years of sending us the most amazing and dazzling photos of our Universe. Hubble has literally expanded the frontiers of human knowledge. Using it to peer deep into space and back in cosmic time, astronomers learned that galaxies formed from smaller patches of ‘stuff’ in the early universe by capturing light from newborn galaxies as it looked 13 billion years ago. The creation of this light is made from the billions of stars out there, illuminating our universe for all to see. How is this light created? How are stars made and what happens once they have used up all their energy? Lets take a brief look at the making and death of stars.

First of all, some basic facts about our Sun. Our Sun is a G2 V type main sequence dwarf star (medium sized), at the center of the solar system and contains nearly 99.8% of the solar systems mass. The colour is whitey green but appears yellowish due to the scattering of blue light in the atmosphere. It is a population I star, that being rich in heavy elements, (high metallicity). The Sun was probably formed from a high proportion of material from prior supernova events (death of super massive stars way bigger than our own). Its composition is about 74% Hydrogen, 24% Helium, 0.8% Oxygen, 0.3% Carbon and 0.2% Iron. Its gravity is about 28 x the Earth’s and is about 150 million km (93 205 678.8 miles) away from Earth, or just over 8 light minutes.

Each star is different, but starts life the same way in clouds and dust called Nebulas, stellar nurseries for stars such as Orion, Eagle and Horse head to name but a few. To make a star, all you need is gravity, hydrogen and time. Gravity pulls the hydrogen gas into a swirling vortex. Gravity brings matter together and when you 'squeeze' things together in smaller spaces, they heat up, basically when you compress something you drive the temperature up. Over 100's and 1000's of years the cloud gets thicker, a large spinning vortex as big as our solar system and at the centre a large dense spinning ball where the pressure builds until large jets of gas burst out at the sides. Eventually a star ignites, throwing off any remainder gas out. With a temperature of 15 million degrees at the core, atoms of gas fuse together. BOOM! A star is born.

So, we now know how a star is created, what about what drives stars energy then? Atoms of Hydrogen smash into each other, this process is called fusion. Hydrogen atoms naturally repel one another, chemistry 101, but if they travel fast enough, really fast, they crash into each other, fusing together to make helium, heat with a small amount of pure energy. The hydrogen gas weighs slightly more than helium, loosing mass during the collision in which this mass turns into energy. Stars are huge, and to drive this you need gravity to compress the star to create nuclear fusion at its core.

What happens when the fuel runs out? Well, eventually it will run out, bigger stars use their fuel more quickly so the bigger the star the shorter its life. Gravity is in a constant battle with the stars fusion process that they balance each other out, however gravity eventually wins the battle. Our Sun is no exception, every second it burns 600million tones of its hydrogen fuel. As hydrogen gets used up, the core slows down giving gravity the edge, with less fusion pushing outward, gravity pushes inward and as fusion fights back the star begins to expand. This is called the red giant stage that will consumes all the inner rocky planets, and most likely even the Earth. This is the end of our beautiful planet Earth (although some theorists think that this process may ‘push’ Earth further out). With no hydrogen left to fuel it, the star starts to burn helium and fuses it with carbon. Blasting energy from its core to the surface, these energy waves blow away the stars outer layer and slowly it disintegrates into a “white dwarf”. A white dwarf is so dense that if a sugar cube amount were placed on Earth, it would fall right through it. Astronomers believe that in the core of a white dwarf there is solid carbon, literally a diamond in the sky!

This is the outcome of our star, but what about bigger ones? Larger stars have a much more violent ending than our G type star. The gravity of these stars is so massive that they can smash together bigger and bigger atoms. The cores of these stars are like factories, manufacturing heavier and heavier elements, which lead to the stars destruction. Gold, Silver, Nickel and other elements are all created in these stars. The next time you wear your gold chain or ring, just think, it wasn't created here on Earth, but in the death of a super massive nova. Once the star starts to make iron, this is the end. Iron absorbs the energy in a 1000th of a second, robbing it of its remaining fuel until gravity wins and the star collapses. It creates a huge explosion, a supernova and the single most violent event in the universe, spewing everything out into space. Then, the whole process of star formation begins again. If it wasn't for these massive explosions, our Sun wouldn't be here, therefore so wouldn't we.

There is only so much hydrogen in the universe and astronomers believe that eventually, the entire universe will simply run out of the star forming gas and eventually the lights will all go out. Thankfully, we will not be around to see this, nor see the death of our own middle-aged star in about 4.57 billion years. We have a long time to appreciate it and be thankful for its life giving ingredients. To be thankful that its rises, sets and rises again, because without it, it’s goodnight sweetheart smile emoticon

Carbon, Oxygen, Iron in our blood, Everything around us came from the belly of a star. We are in a 'golden age' of the universe. A good time to be here, seeing the best of all stages of the universe, filling the darkness with light. For we are all made of stardust.

~ JM

Image Credit: http://bit.ly/1FnZ8dV

More Info:

Hubble: http://hubblesite.org/

Sun Facts: http://bit.ly/1xqjsaz

NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory: http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/

Space Weather: http://www.spaceweather.com/

Encyclopaedia Britannica: http://bit.ly/1CiFOPI

Stellar Evolution: http://bit.ly/1BkXinG

Peter Cullen, the voice of Optimus Prime, describes the goals of the James Webb Space Telescope. Even gets to talk about it transforming. Win.

Alex Parker, an astronomer from Harvard, camped out one night with his telescope to indulge in a spot of star-gazing. The night sky was very cloudy and so he had to wait for the clouds to clear. Rather than twiddling his thumbs, he decided to play around with various images from the Hubble Space Telescope, and ended up assembling them into a colourful mosaic using photo-mosaicing software to assemble the digital collage. Yeah, that's right, the resulting image was this recreation of Vincent van Gogh's "Starry Night"! Alex - I salute you! -Jean

Siding Spring

 On October 19, 2014; a comet will pass within 138,000 kilometers of Mars; less than half the distance between the Earth and the Moon. Based on how their orbits align, Mars is actually going to pass right through the tail of this comet after it passes.

There’s no risk of impact from the current orbits, but this might well be a rough day for Mars orbiting spacecraft, which will have to find a way to shelter from debris. Aside from that problem…we’re going to get images unlike those ever seen before; a close-up view of a comet as seen from another planet.

 These shots are 3 separate images from the Hubble Space Telescope of that comet, known as Siding Spring (after the observatory that first found it) and still far away out in space. The upper images are the raw images taken from Hubble; the lower images are filtered versions of the upper images. The comet is close enough to the sun to start venting some of its volatiles and produce a tail, but it will keep growing in activity as it approaches the sun.

 If you look closely, you can see that there are not only multiple jets on this comet, but either the jets move or different places on the comet are erupting at different times.

 -JBB

Image credit: NASA, ESA, Planetary Science Institute

http://www.universetoday.com/110763/mars-bound-comet-siding-spring-sprouts-multiple-jets/