Rage, rage against the dying of the light
Do not go tame into that good night,
Old age must burn and rave at the end of the day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light – Do not go easy on that good night – Dylan Thomas
Stars don’t live forever; they cast their beautiful bright light into the merciless darkness of Space for a time, and then go out like little candles lost in Eternity. Small, lonely stars, like our own Sun, die in relative peace and great beauty, puffing out their outer layers into the darkness of Space. When our lonely sun dies, it will first swell into a swollen red giant star, cannibalizing the inner planets Mercury, Venus and possibly our Earth. It will then eventually wither away into a very dense little stellar corpse called white dwarfthat will be surrounded by one of the most beautiful shrouds our Universe has to offer: a so-called planetary nebulaan enchanting “butterfly” from the Cosmos, made of multicolored gases that once made up the outer layers of the now dead, lonely little star.
The most massive stars, however, blast the Universe with fire when they die as spectacular supernovae. Supernovae are the brightest and most powerful stellar explosions in the Universe, and can be observed in even the remotest corners of the Universe. Stars shatter for two reasons: they have absorbed, like a vampire, too much mass from a sister and victim star, Prayed they have burned through their necessary supply of nuclear fuel that has kept them bouncing against the unrelenting force of gravity, and dramatically collapsed, and then exploded, spewing stellar matter out into the Cosmos.
In February 2013, astronomers announced that it is possible to predict when a massive star will go supernova by looking for the warning signs of the smaller bursts it releases just before it explodes with a white-hot fury.
star of death
Our Sun, at present, is a common place and relatively insignificant, main stream (which burns hydrogen) star. It is a beautiful bright golden yellow. There are eight major planets, a variety of mostly icy moons, and other smaller objects that make up our Sun’s familiar and lovely family. Our Solar System inhabits the far-flung suburbs of an ordinary, yet majestic, barred spiral galaxy, the Milky Way. Our Sun, like all stars, will die. But, today, she is a jumping star, still in active and productive middle age, lighting up the darkness around her with incandescent fire. However, in another five billion years or so, it will be an old star, with little life in the future. main sequence. Stars of the small mass of our Sun usually live about 10,000 million years. But our Star, and middle-aged stars like it, will continue to flood Space with light, burning hydrogen at their hearts as fuel. nuclear fusionfor another 5 billion years, give or take.
When our Sun and other Sun-like stars have finally used up their supply of hydrogen fuel, their appearance begins to change. Now they are old stars. At the heart of an ancient Sun-like star is a hidden helium core, surrounded by a shell in which hydrogen is still fusing to form helium. The shell begins to swell outward and the hidden heart grows as the star ages. The helium core itself begins to shrivel under its own mass, heating wildly until, at last, it becomes hot enough in the center for a new stage of nuclear fusion to begin. Now it is helium that is burned to make the heavier element, carbon. Five billion years from now, our dying old Sun will have a small, extremely hot core that will emit more energy than our still-active middle-aged Sun does at this time. The outer layers of our Star will, by this time, have swollen to frightening proportions: it has become a dazzling glow. red giant star, hungry for the blood of their own planet-children! Ultimately, the core of our star will continue to shrink, and since it will no longer be able to emit radiation through nuclear fusion, any further evolution will be determined solely by the force of gravity. Our angry and dying Star will shed her outer layers, but her heart will remain intact. All the matter on the Sun will eventually collapse into this pathetic remnant object that is only the size of our little planet. In this way, our Star will evolve into the type of stellar body known as white dwarf HAS white dwarf The star is doomed to get progressively cooler and cooler over time. In the end, our Sun will probably become an object known as Black Dwarf. black dwarf stars are hypothetical objects because none are thought to (yet) dwell in our Cosmos. It takes hundreds of billions of years for a white dwarf to finally cool down to black dwarf stage, and our Universe is “only” a little over 13.7 billion years old.
Stars that weigh at least 8 times more than our Sun die much more furiously than their smaller counterparts. Massive stars cannot resist the crushing property of gravity. Although the war between good and evil is often referred to as the oldest conflict, the war between pressure and gravity is considerably older. The pressure that pushes everything outside–derived from nuclear fusion, and is what keeps a star bouncing against the crushing force of gravity. Gravity seeks to pull everything in. When a star runs out of hydrogen fuel and reaches the point where its pushing pressure can no longer withstand the pull of gravity, it has reached the end of the road. Supernovae typically explode when the iron core of a massive star reaches 1.4 times the mass of our Sun. The most massive stars in the Universe collapse and disappear entirely, becoming that gravitational monstrosity, a black hole Massive stars, which are somewhat less massive, explode in supernova explosions, becoming a dense stellar corpse known as neutron star neutron stars are even denser than White Dwarfs.
forecasting the storm
In an article published in the February 7, 2013 issue of the magazine Nature, An international team of astronomers suggests that it may be possible to predict when a star is ready to go supernova before it undergoes that final deadly explosion. One of the study’s authors, Dr. Mark Sullivan of the University of Southampton in England, explained on February 8, 2013 space.com that “For a star like our Sun, the energy it emits from the fusion of hydrogen into helium deep in the core exerts an outward pressure on the star, usually counteracted by an inward pressure from gravity. However, if the star’s luminosity increases above a certain amount–the so-called eddington luminosity–the outward pressure of the resulting radiation is strong enough to overcome gravity, which can then drive an outflow of material. Gravity waves can act as a conduit to move this large super eddington luminosity in the core in an ejection of material from the star’s outer envelope”.
The team of astronomers used three telescopes in their effort to find out more about the way older stars get angry before they die: NASA Fast mission Palomar Observatoryand the Very Large Array (VLA). The researchers began by studying a star that lives about 500 million light-years away from our planet. The massive star weighed about 50 times the mass of our Sun, eventually shattering as a supernova named SN 2010mc.
The astronomers’ study indicates that 40 days before the last deadly explosion, the dying old star emitted a giant outburst, releasing matter equivalent to about 1 percent of our star’s mass, or about 3,330 times the mass of our star. our star. planet, at about 4.5 million miles per hour.
This burst radiated “about a million times more than the Sun’s energy output in an entire year,” Dr. Sullivan went on to explain. He added that this precursor, however, “is still about 5,000 times less than the energy output of the subsequent supernova.”
The close timing between the smaller outburst and the star’s final explosive end strongly suggests that they are related. One of the study’s authors, Dr. Mansi Kasliwal of Carnegie Institution for Science in Pasadena, California, told the press in February 2013 that “what is surprising is the short time between the precursor eruption and the eventual supernova explosion; one month is an extremely small fraction of the 10 million year lifetime of a star”.
The lead author of the new study, Dr. Eran Ofek of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, noted on February 8, 2013 space.com that probability models showed there was only a 0.1 percent chance that the outburst was a random event.
By comparing their data to three models proposed to explain how the earlier outburst might have occurred, the astronomers found that gravity waves helped propel mass into the star’s atmosphere. Gravity waves are fluctuations that result from matter rising due to buoyancy and then sinking due to gravity.
“Our discovery of SN 2010mc shows that we can mark the imminent death of a massive star. By predicting the explosion, we can catch it in the act,” Dr. Kasliwal continued.