Massive Stars Sound Warning They Are About To Go Supernova (1 Viewer)

[Nihilianth]

Humans are fucking amazing, how cool is it that we can capture such an event and that we can now successfully change the orbit of an asteroid....

What a time to be alive....

A bit off-topic sorta here, but, IRT all those people complaining about human activities "killing the earth" and making animals and things go extinct. These people will go on about how "we need to take care of our planet instead of spending all of this money on space," as if it's some sort of zero-sum game where all 7 billion human beings must only concentrate on one thing and can't have different careers and fields of specialty. 🙄

But the ironic thing is, life on this planet is entirely finite. Life only has about a billion years or so at most. Advanced life less than that. The ONLY chance terrestrial (earth-based) life as we know it has ever had, and ever WILL have, IS humans. And even more ironically, the destruction we have wrought on this planet....the space program can and does fix with the development of newer and better technologies. Especially with advanced materials science, such as better insulating materials that increases cost savings on energy. Our satellites have gathered a TON of data on the albedo effect of the earth, and have come up with a very near-future solution to install highly reflective materials on the rooftops of city buildings, which would reduce the effects of sunlight absorption.

 

[macread]

I missed Haleys comet last time around because of the weather so will just have to wait till next time.

 

[clementines]

Fascinating! Thanks for sharing.

 

[wiggins]

Space is awesome, I would definitely go if given the chance.

You are there. We are all there. We are currently slowly orbiting the centre of the milky way. By slowly I mean about 828 000 km an hour. And the milky way, our galaxy, is orbiting our local cluster which in turn is gravitationally dancing with the rest of the mass in the universe.

We are, literally, lost in space.

Astronomers from Liverpool John Moores University and the University of Montpellier have devised an ‘early warning’ system to sound the alert when a massive star is about to end its life in a supernova explosion. The work was published today (October 13, 2022) in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.



In this new study, investigators determined that massive stars (typically between 8 and 20 solar masses) in the last phase of their lives, the so-called ‘red supergiant’ phase, will suddenly become around a hundred times fainter in visible light in the last few months before they die. This dimming is caused by a sudden accumulation of material around the star, which obscures its light.



Until now, it was not known how long it took the star to accrete this material. For the first time, scientists have now simulated how red supergiants might look when they are embedded within these pre-explosion ‘cocoons’.

Old telescope archives show that images do exist of stars that went on to explode around a year after the image was taken. The stars appear as normal in these images, meaning they cannot yet have built up the theoretical circumstellar cocoon. This suggests that the cocoon is assembled in less than a year, which is considered to be extremely fast.

Benjamin Davies from Liverpool John Moores University, and lead author of the paper, says “The dense material almost completely obscures the star, making it 100 times fainter in the visible part of the spectrum. This means that, the day before the star explodes, you likely wouldn’t be able to see it was there.” He adds, “Until now, we’ve only been able to get detailed observations of supernovae hours after they’ve already happened. With this early-warning system we can get ready to observe them real-time, to point the world’s best telescopes at the precursor stars, and watch them getting literally ripped apart in front of our eyes

https://scitechdaily.com/explosion-imminent-massive-stars-sound-warning-they-are-about-to-go-supernova/#amp_tf=From%20%251%24s&aoh=16656907016191&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&ampshare=https%3A%2F%2Fscitechdaily.com%2Fexplosion-imminent-massive-stars-sound-warning-they-are-about-to-go-supernova%2F

Nice post Ethyl.

I like the ideas of the theoretical physicists who postulate that as the star goes supernova it implodes the core so hard and so fast it becomes a black hole and then a 'big bang' to start off another universe.

Worlds within worlds...

 

[Werwolf]

So What? this shit takes million's of years' who really gives a fuck, our dust won't even be remembered, we have enough crap that should be getting dealt with here now

 

[Right In The Feelz]

Space is awesome, I would definitely go if given the chance.

I'd get lost

There are so many beautiful and chaotic things outside of our tiny home in the vastness of space. The numbers describing distance alone are enough to make me go cross-eyed. There are millions of objects or situations that could happen that would wipe us out in an instant, and our entire existence would be turned to dust with nothing to ever learn about or remember anything on our planet. That realization alone should put into perspective just how insignificant we really are. But even that wouldn't pull heads out of asses so we have always been doomed from the start. Sweet post, Bro!

 

[Can'tSleep]

I'd get lost

There are so many beautiful and chaotic things outside of our tiny home in the vastness of space. The numbers describing distance alone are enough to make me go cross-eyed. There are millions of objects or situations that could happen that would wipe us out in an instant, and our entire existence would be turned to dust with nothing to ever learn about or remember anything on our planet. That realization alone should put into perspective just how insignificant we really are. But even that wouldn't pull heads out of asses so we have always been doomed from the start. Sweet post, Bro!

I agree, that's what makes it so interesting to me. We know nothing.