Friday, October 21, 2016

At Least We Can Still Watch Stars Explode

Maybe you wonder where's the positivity in watching stars explode but they're going to do it anyway and it's not like we caused it.  There doesn't seem any harm in watching and the explosions in these stars are something scientists have never seen before. (Science Daily:  Unexplainable activity in distant stars: New class of explosive events?)

When stars start showing a new kind of explosive behavior, what kind of conclusion should be draw other than we're screwed and have no chance to survive.

(Ed:  thanks for that sunshine!)

Well, this isn't so much sunshine as a supernova which will burn every molecule of your ex-corpus into radioactive hell.



Astronomers have found a pair of extraordinary objects that dramatically burst in X-rays. This discovery, obtained with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA's XMM-Newton observatory, may represent a new class of explosive events.

Credit: Chandra X-Ray Observatory

- Science Daily


No matter what it's doing, it's looking damn cool doing it.

The trick with these stars is they can do it more than once.

Dr. Jimmy Irwin, UA associate professor of physics and astronomy, along with a three-student team of undergraduate researchers, detected seven instances of massive flares of energy in X-ray binary stars in two separate galaxies after poring through over a decade of Chandra X-ray Observatory data.

But, unlike supernovas or gamma ray bursts in other galaxies, which collapse and are destroyed by huge increases in energy, the two stars researchers detected flare to the verge of exploding, only to simmer to baseline energy in an hour.  They repeat the process every few days.


- Science Daily

If you're not seeing the sexual metaphor, read it again, Pollyanna.  Now we see it that other stars going supernova are actually instances of stellar premature ejaculation and this new variety of stars represents the class of stellar Indian sex gods, practiced in the art of Tantric love.


(Ed:  are you seriously going for the stellar porno here?)

Sure.  It's cheap but it's satisfying.  It ain't love but here's a tip, Casanova.  Stellar porno wasn't going to love you anyway.


The punchline is the scientists really don't know what's happening here except something blowed-up real good and in a couple of days will do it again.  That delay is what bollixes the astronomers because they can't command the best telescopes in the world to, hey, just watch that for a few days, ok?

The astronomer's answer is to get better at predicting when the blow-ups happen as they're seriously lusting for seeing the build-up toward the bang.

(Ed:  maybe it is stellar porno!)

I'm tellin' you.

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