Cosmic Grim Reaper Seen For First Time by Radka Konkolova

I think, it was Albert Einstein, who said that only two things are endless, universe and human senselessness. I am almost sure, he was thoroughly right. There are really a great amount of planets, stars, moons, asteroids and many other universe entities as well as another galaxies in the whole space. In my opinion we can't imagine all of it. The research of surrounding of our home planet must be truly very interesting, although also expensive enough. The universe is changing itself every minute, cause it is not static. There are many moves, for example rotation around the Sun or around the planets in the case of their moons, creations of new parts of the space and destructions of the stars by explosions. Some of them are then visible. Planets and stars usually vanish in various ways. But this end of this universe entity is almost always accompanied with creation of very bright objects, which “shine” for few weeks or months on the sky. These several types of stars explosions are called Supernova. It is something like cosmic Grim Reaper, that signals the death of the universe's most massive stars. There are some two reasons why these stars explode. The first, when the star is a Red Supergiant, hefty star, which ran out of its nuclear fuel reserves and the whole its core collapsed, or second, when the star is a White Dwarf, which stockpiles a mass from its stellar guide and comes over thermonuclear explosion. After that, the star shrinks and finally it explodes, what fluctuates to creation of a shock wave, which “migrates” in the surrounding of dead star and creates the rest of Supernova. This shock wave forms a fireball, which is billion times brighter than the Sun is, according to the researchers. It moves in very high speed, approximately at 20 million mph, what is 10,000 km per second. What is very interesting, is the fact that these explosions are the main source of all elements which are more heavy than oxygen is and plenty of them, e.g. Calcium in our bones, iron in our blood, all of these is consequence of such and similar star explosions, which took place few billions years ago. Another very interesting thing is fact, that this Supernova is visible only by telescope. But either researchers have never seen the moment of explosion and that just before the explosion. Till now. This has been really big problem, and scientists have observed the fireball for the last over 30 years or so. They have videlicet wanted to see the final moment of the doomed star just before the visible explosion. Older scientists have predicted that this explosion is overtook by a surge of ultraviolet light. Now they achieve that also thanks to GALEX, what is space telescope, which orbits Earth about every 100 minutes and views the universe in ultraviolet. It helped the scientists in the last Supernova, while it enabled them to see the last moment of doomed red supergiant, which can swell to 100 times its original size before its death. Its future death was noticed few weeks before the optical discovery of supernova, in the first stage in star's death. So now the researchers and scientists fulfil their long-term dream and they can see almost all phases of the star's life and death.

related story: http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20080612/sc_space/cosmicgrimreaperseenforfirsttime;_ylt=AljoHx5gkiytFx4nkG5G3Y2s0NUE

by Radka Konkolova for PocketNews (http://pocketnews.tv)

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