Stellar Things: Stellar Science and Trivia
IMPROVING THE FIRMAMENT
When the turbulent mass of dust, rocks, and other things left over from Creation finished expelling planets, the space between them was dotted with little bright things, which some bright minds called “stars.” These are hot, dense balls of gas (and none have the names of politicians?) Which means that their spectrum is close to that of a perfect thermal radiator, which can produce a continuous, uninterrupted spectrum. In English, that means you can see colors very well. That red hot mom in the next galaxy isn’t as sexy as that cute blue girl a few light years away. Because hot stars, with temperatures around 60,000 K, are shown in blue, while a cold star, perhaps 30,000 K, will make you see in red.
Not all stars, of course, were created equal. You have the big ones and the small ones. Stars that have more than 6 solar masses (a mass equal to that of the sun multiplied by 6) are expected to become supernovae, or explode their top and fade into a glow of light that remains in space for years afterward. of his disappearance. The small stars are not necessarily the lesser lights. White dwarf stars may have used up most of their fuel and shrunk in on themselves, but having a radius of only 0.01 that of the Sun, their mass remains equal to that of the Sun, giving it a density of about 1 million times the density of water. Regular dwarfs are the smallest stars, burning hydrogen into helium. Poor little brown dwarfs never got enough gas to burn hydrogen.
So what good are these little flares? Well, for one thing, the Sun is a star. Without it, there would be no heat and warmth for the Earth. Other elements necessary to sustain life, such as carbon, nitrogen and oxygen, are part of the consequences of the death of previous stars. Being heavier elements, when massive stars exploded into supernovae, they fell through space and were trapped in clouds of dust and debris that eventually formed planets, like our own land.
Like all good things, even the stars come to an end. Either oversized dark circles explode in a supernova, or they just run out of gas and literally vanish. Really huge stars, with masses 25 to 50 times that of a sun, disappear in a few million years. The Sun is expected to last about 10 billion years. With this in mind, and our entire galaxy formed from an interstellar cloud of gas and dust some 4.6 billion years ago, no one needs to run out and buy a parka.
However, the stars have made man poetic for thousands of years. However, the stars themselves remained in place. While they appear to move over us in a flickering arc, the optical illusion is caused by the Earth’s rotation from east to west, once every 24 hours.
Why do they shine to begin with? First, they glow because their gases are hot enough to cause nuclear fission, where two atoms join to form another atom that generates an energy level that looks like light to us. They glow for the same reason that we see the illusion of waves on hot pavement: hot air rising into the atmosphere.
Flickering stars? Yes, we have them too. They are called pulsars, which are neutron stars. These are the remnants of the overactive nucleus after a star has gone supernova. A misalignment of the axis of rotation of the pulsar and of the magnetic poles causes intermittent bombardment of light. The magnetic fields of neutron stars are about 1 trillion the force of Earth. Accelerated electrons near the magnetic poles are thrown into space and show up as pulsating light due to the star’s rotation.
You can make a wish on a shooting star, blinking or not, but they’re not really stars … they’re meteors. Although they are allowed the more ethereal title until they get home. The falling “stars” are seen at night, when meteors from the size of a pea to huge tons are pulled into Earth’s atmosphere by their gravity. The friction between the surface of meteors and the air produces intense heat that leaves a fiery trail as it burns before hitting the ground, although not all meteors burn. The ones that don’t, continue to burn and show the telltale trail as they crash. If you’re very lucky, once every 33 years or so you’ll be outside looking up at the night sky, when a cloud of meteors and dust orbiting the Earth are sucked up by gravity en masse, rather than individually. The resulting “rain” is one of nature’s strengths.
BRIGHT EXAMPLES
You might think that our biggest star is the Sun. You may also be wrong. What is now believed to be the largest is called the “Pistol Star”. It is located in the center of the Gun Nebula (a cloud of dust and gas from which stars are born) in the Milky Way. One hundred times the mass of the Sun and ten million times brighter, scientists are puzzled as to how such a large star formed, or how it might behave in the future.
Size is also not indicative of age. Stars continually form, burn, and die. The oldest stars are estimated to be the age of the Universe itself. And since astronomers are still arguing over whether it is 10 or 15 billion years old, no one is quite sure about the stars. However, they can identify the birth certificate of at least one young man, an 820-year-old pulsar. The rapidly spinning remnants of a supernova’s core create a pulsar. Scientists have set their sights on a place in space, where such a cataclysmic explosion took place in late 1181 AD as mentioned in Japanese and Chinese historical records. His suspicions were confirmed with the intermittent finding, in early 2002.
The Sun is not our brightest star either. Most people consider it to be Polaris, the Pole Star. Again wrong. They are both overshadowed by Sirius, the dog star. While the Sun is closer to Earth, and its light reaches us eight minutes after leaving home, Sirius is actually a thousand times brighter than the faintest star visible to the naked eye!
Polaris is bright, but it does not permanently point to the pole. Four thousand years ago, the North Star was Thuban. In another ten to fourteen thousand years, it will be Vega. As it is not a perfect sphere, the Earth wobbles on its axis as it rotates, due to the gravitational pull of the Sun and the Moon, so the direction of the axis changes slightly. What goes around comes around. Polaris will be the pole star again, ten to fourteen thousand years after Vega is lost from sight.
When the day draws to a close, the evening star appears on the horizon. Only it’s not even a star. It is any planet visible in the evening sky and generally refers to Venus or Mercury. They are never too east of the sun and can be seen when the sun goes down.
However, once it’s set, you can try counting the stars in the galaxy. At one per second, it will only take about 3,000 years.
Enjoy your stargazing, because the closest we will get to a known star is in the year 9800, when Barnard’s star will be only 1.5 light years away … and will remain invisible to the eye. .. Barnard’s, and everyone else.
To think that this whole thing about observing sparkling gas balls came about as a result of the Big Bang. We have also been subjected to smaller “bumps”, although not in recent memory. Scientists have determined that a bundle of volatile stars, known as the Scorpius-Centaurus Horde, skittered past Earth a few million years ago, giving the old planet some good scares by exploding and damaging the ozone layer, exposing life. terrestrial such as bivalves and plankton to the harmful ultraviolet rays of the sun. And they are backkkkkkk. Well, not yet. The next member of the Horde to go supernova is a star named Antares. But 500 light-years away, it’s too far to dump the apple cart again … we wait.
