It remains to some extent a theory, but Doug has got as close as anyone to actually seeing it happen.It's started by getting alert on the computer that a supernova had gone off in a very nearby galaxy, only 210 million light years away, here is a pic...
There were apparently nonsensical structures of space and time, spat out when Albert Einstein's equations weretaken to their extreme conclusion. Einstein's theory of relativitydoes lead us into very strange and unfamiliar paths. Einstein himself didn...
And became billions of times stronger than our sun's, now as the star span, it channelled out radio signals from its north and south poles, signals that swept past earth with every rotation of the star, this was the source of the mysterious pulses, s...
The calculations focus on a strange quality of all matter. It's one that defies common sense. But it's fundamental to the work of Astrophysicists like professor Douglas Leonard. Solidity is an illusion. If I run up with my fist and punch a burg wall,...
Could these be the neutron stars predicted by Z? astronomers nicknamed them pulsars and immediately set their telescopes searching for further clues about them, just a year later, they found one, in the perfect place to put Z's theory to the test.In...
He was sure that when a supernova exploded, it left behind a kernel so dense that a cupful would be as heavy as a mountain, he called it a neutron star, it seems so preposterous that Z's ideas were dismissed, until that is a new way of scouring the h...
Bloating in old age to become red giants;their cores contracting into white dwarves; The most massive ones exploding as supernovae; Fleeing the elements they have created, out into space to form the materials for the next generation of stars. But tha...
An implosion that launches an explosion creating enough heat and energy to forge almost all the other elements.The supernova explosion is able to produce some of the very rare elements heavier than iron, the zinc, the gold, the platinum, the silver,...
And with his colleagues, he did the calculations to prove it. The key was the conditions created in the final stages about massive stars fighting against its gravity. These stars are so massive and hot that they can go through a whole series of nucle...
And so i can see that there is hydrogen being produced by the supernova, and over here the yellow orange light is due to glowing atoms of sodium, it's the same sodium glow that we saw when I sprinkled the chemical into the fire, these ones here in th...
The supernovae that Alex photographs are hundreds of millions of light years away. The only reason that he can photograph them so distinctly is because there are such colossal explosions. And appreciating the power of a supernova's explosion has been...
And takes dedication perseverance and a love of the thrill of the chase, not just any kind of astronomer but a supernovae hunter, and one with perfect timing.You know usually nothing much happens in astronomy, stars live for millions or billions of y...
The enigma of the white dwarf has been resolved. Scientists have discovered how the vast majority of the stars, including our own sun, would end their days, as the white dwarfs gently fading into the darkness of the universe. But not all stars go so...
Thats why what we physicists called pressure. This pressure is created as the particles jostle for position. Its a principle of Quantum Mechanics and when it was applying to stars, the lives of dead white dwarfs suddenly made sense. What stopped them...
Once the fusion stops, the whole thing collapses under its own weight to form a white dwarf, so you got this very small blob which is incredibly dense, it's going to be something like a million times denser than it started off, so dense in fact that...
