Sunday, April 9, 2017

When Nothing in the News Except America's Last Act, Then What

Instead of these pissants with their cruise missiles, we want to see a big bang.  (Science Daily:  Dramatic stellar fireworks of star birth)

Astronomers have found there are explosions at star birth just as there are when the star dies in a supernova.  If America had done that, it could have saved the world one whole hell of a lot of aggravation.



Stellar explosions are most often associated with supernovae, the spectacular deaths of stars.  But new ALMA observations of the Orion Nebula complex provide insights into explosions at the other end of the stellar life cycle, star birth.  Astronomers captured these dramatic images of the remains of a 500-year-old explosion as they explored the firework-like debris from the birth of a group of massive stars, demonstrating that star formation can be a violent and explosive process too.  The colors in the ALMA data represent the relative Doppler shifting of the millimeter-wavelength light emitted by carbon monoxide gas.  The blue color in the ALMA data represents gas approaching at the highest speeds; the red color is from gas moving toward us more slowly. The background image includes optical and near-infrared imaging from both the Gemini South and ESO Very Large Telescope.  The famous Trapezium Cluster of hot young stars appears towards the bottom of this image. The ALMA data do not cover the full image shown here.

Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), J. Bally/H. Drass et al


Enjoy the parallels to foreign policy.

About 100,000 years ago, several protostars started to form deep within the OMC-1. Gravity began to pull them together with ever-increasing speed, until 500 years ago two of them finally clashed.  Astronomers are not sure whether they merely grazed each other or collided head-on, but either way it triggered a powerful eruption that launched other nearby protostars and hundreds of colossal streamers of gas and dust out into interstellar space at over 150 kilometres per second.  This cataclysmic interaction released as much energy as our Sun emits in 10 million years.

- SD

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