Looking at the sky
… is something I could do endlessly. I love stars, astronomy, black holes and general singularities, the whole works. When I meet somebody who’s indifferent to the grand heavens, I go through some deep confusion of how a person could not care, not be amazed, and not be interested — and of course, evaluate how much I could possibly spend time with this person.
An exceptionally beautiful picture from NASA of Eta Carinae, a star which they believe will explode, but will luckily miss earth for the obvious reason seen below:
Phil Plait’s blog which has some fun commentary. Here are some excerpts:
The blue part is an optical image from Hubble, and shows the bipolar lobes of gas ejected when Eta Car had a coughing fit back in the 1840s. That’s 20 octillion tons of gas (20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) it ejected at about a million miles per hour.
If the star is really massive, then it can fuse helium into carbon once the hydrogen in the core is used up. Then it can fuse carbon into neon, and up the periodic table until it hits iron. Stars can’t fuse iron in their cores, which takes away the source of support for the zillions of tons of gas in the star. It collapses … and then the outer part of the star explodes. The inner part collapses down into a neutron star or a black hole.
