Tag Archives: star

☆Born to shine, forced to fuse☆

Stars, like us, have an exciting life journey. Stars are born when gas and dust in cold molecular clouds collapse from gravity. Just like our solar system, the formation of a star involves the gas cloud spinning, heating, and flattening until the star is formed. Something I thought was cool was that stars tend to […] Continue reading

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Star Formation

When I was a kid, I thought stars were mysterious, distant, beautiful little things in the sky. I often pictured them as little beacons far out into the universe where the “spacemans” – a cute figment of my imagination – use to locate themselves once they get lost in the dark. A polar opposite of […] Continue reading

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MAGNETAR

As you know, neutron stars are the result massive stars (many times more massive the the sun) collapsing inward on themselves, leaving behind an extremely dense and energetic core. As you might expect these stars are extremely energetic — what you might not know is that sometimes as a result of the in-falling star materials … Continue reading MAGNETAR Continue reading

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Black Holes Eating Stars, Get Hungrier

The content of this post is based from an article on Space.com titled, “A Hungry Black Hole Devoured a Star, and Its ‘Burp’ Revealed How It Chowed Down”. So, yeah, this is about to be exciting. In the cataclysmic event known as ASASSN-14li, a star passed too close to a black hole. The enormous gravity … Continue reading Black Holes Eating Stars, Get Hungrier Continue reading

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The Death of the Sun

Unfortunately, our Solar System will not exist forever–our Sun’s lifespan is indeed finite. Sunlike stars stay on the main sequence for approximately 10 billions years. In other words, this is about how long the Sun will shine. The Sun is about 4.6 billion years old, so we may expect about 5.4 billion more years of … Continue reading The Death of the Sun Continue reading

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Shine on, Crazy Diamond

All the light we see and information we receive in our day to day lives is all thanks to the sun- but do we ever really stop to think what allows the sun to produce to light we so rely on? The sun actually relies heavily on quantum physics to even exist- which sounds very […] Continue reading

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Blog #1 Vast Size and Scale

From Chapter 1 of our course textbook, we dived deep into the vastness that is space. We explored what our cosmic address is, how long it takes to travel among the stars in terms of light-years, and measured our distance from the center of the Milky Way. Despite this almost unimaginable expanse, the chapter doesn’t really […] Continue reading

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Our Guiding Star

So many stars come and go based on the time of year, where we are located on the planet, how much of the sky is visible, etc.  Although we can only see some stars on some nights there is one star that we can always see.  This star is the North Star also known as […] Continue reading

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Star Lore

Constellations of the northern sky Have you ever looked up into the night sky, gazed upon the stars, tried to imagine them within those famous constellations, and wondered, how the heck does that group of stars look like a man carrying a club and a shield/lion/pelt?  That would be Orion, (also, The Hunter) who I found […] Continue reading

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Twinkle Twinkle Little Planet

Sounds wrong because the extra syllable blemishes the aesthetic quality of the symmetry of the rest of the poem. Planets do twinkle, in fact. Its just that we do not notice. And it is the hallmark of a truly good (and bored) scientist to correct a misconception, even if it is only superhuman vision that […] Continue reading

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