Amazing footage of an exploding star
Hal Albach
Posts: 747
I'm not sure if this is real-time, or just CGA, but it still looks great.
Hal Albach
Posts: 747
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But based on some real observation, from YouTube: "This animation is based on photometric observations made by NASA’s Kepler space telescope. By closely monitoring the star KSN 2011d, located 1.2 billion light-years away, Kepler caught the onset of the early flash and subsequent explosion."
Of course, this was 1.2 billion years ago, so they aren't anybody we know.
-Phil
Even with that, though, occupants of planets in nearby systems would also likely perish. The devastation is widespread and covers many trillions of miles. Folks living near Betelgeuse don't have much time left. Let's hope they've socked away some for their future, what's left of it. Fortunately our closeby neighbors are pretty stable.
In any case, think of it this way: 'sploding stars is what made every atom of us. Maybe next time around, the end result will turn out a little bit better...
Yep, the thought that the very atoms that comprise my being were forged in stars going supernova is pretty overwhelming. Not just one star mind you, quite likely we are made of a soup of parts from many stars.
Not all atoms though. If they have done their sums right physicists now say that hydrogen, helium and perhaps some lithium dates back nearly 14 billion years to the big bang.
Genesis has nothing on that story.
Cosmology has this thing called the "Cosmological Principle". Which basically assumes the universe looks the same no matter where you are in it and no matter which direction you look. Without that assumption none of the maths works out.
But then observation suggests the universe has been expanding and getting less dense over time.
One conclusion from that is that there was no single point from which the big bang exploded. Rather it was just that the universe was infinitely dense, everywhere, and infinitely big. It just "thinned out", growing a lot of gaps, whilst all the time getting bigger than the infinite size it started at.
Sounds odd, but infinity is a strange thing, as Cantor showed us.
On the other hand, what particle?
Last I heard if you add up all the energy in the universe, which includes matter thanks to E=mc^2, you get a big fat zero. That is to say you can make an entire universe out of nothing.
Then again, young physicists like Nima Arkani-Hamed will start to explain to you why the whole notion of space and time is not the fundamental thing we should be talking about.
If there was no time to the singularity, there was no spatial dimension, so no size. So it would all depend on the tape measure. Oh, wait! There were no tape measures, so we're back to square one. If we could just see beyond that boundary...
Much of this is based on the traditional model, which seems to have a new revision every day. Just last week I saw a guy on the side of the road holding a sign that read, "Will propose a new theory of the Big Bang for food."