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Brightest Star Explosion Seen Blinds Satellite
July 15, 2010

This NASA image obtained July 14, 2010 shows Tycho This NASA image obtained July 14, 2010 shows Tycho's Supernova, the red circle visible in the upper left part of the image, called SN 1572 is a remnant of a star explosion. (Photo AFP)
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hansotto
6:22pm Jul 15, 2010

the atoms from that nova in a few billions years will be part of a sentient being on a faraway planet. just like our body contains the atoms from novas all over the cosmos. every molekule in our body contains the dna of every being that ever existed on this planet. we are all one with the whole cosmos and every being on this planet.....

when you think, mull,ponder or meditate about this, you will realise that our scientific knowledge has brought us past the beliefs of our antiquated religions on this planet.humanity has to be upgraded and we have to learn that the only possible religion today is universal love


SirAnthonyKnown-Bender
4:39pm Jul 15, 2010

To address your questions:

1. Not like this. Our sun will expand and become a red giant, it does not have enough mass to go supernova. However, in its red giant phase it will expand and the Earth will be incinerated. In fact the sun is gradually getting hotter and thus the Earth will be unable to sustain life in around 1 Billion years time. Praying to Mecca will not make a jot of difference at this point. The Sun will eventually lose its outer red giant layers forming a nebula with a dense white dwarf in the centre.

2. All of the matter ejected in supernovas, will, after billions of years, collapse and be recycled into new stars and planets.

3. Our galaxy, as all galaxies, was created by the slow collapse of matter under the force of gravity owing to small fluctuations in density in a given region of space. The elusive dark matter and dark energy are still missing from our total understanding of this process however.

4. Yes the universe is continually expanding. To be precise though, this is not the expansion of stars and planets away from each other through space, but the expansion of space itself.

...whoops, gotta dash, I hear the call to prayer.


lolipopee
2:31pm Jul 15, 2010

This is very cool! This got me thinking about the book The Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking.

Could it be this is what would happen after our star died?! or this is just a new beginning of a new galaxie up there?! was this how our galaxie created?!

i guess our universe is expanding every seconds...


SirAnthonyKnown-Bender
11:04am Jul 15, 2010

I guess nobody will comment on this one. Fascinating though and perhaps enlightening to contrast the scientific, enlightenment imperative, which has enabled us to probe the farthest reaches of the universe, with the late bronze age mindset that can't even work out that Mecca is north-west rather than directly west from Indonesia. What value is to be gained from artificially bounding human culture at the level of human knowledge that existed two millennia ago, a time when people didn't even know that the Earth went around the sun, or that diseases were caused by micro-organisms? The light of reason and rationality that exists this country needs encouragement to power itself up beyond the murky 5 watt gloom that it currently registers. Instead, day by day, it seems to get dimmer.


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The brightest explosion of a star ever seen temporarily blinded a satellite set up to watch such events, astronomers said on Wednesday.

The gamma-ray burst and explosion of X-rays that followed came from a star that died 5 billion years ago, far beyond our own Milky Way galaxy, NASA and British scientists said. It took this long for the radiation to reach the Swift orbiting observatory.

The bright X-ray burst blinded Swift on June 21, and the observatory’s software ignored it as if it were an anomaly, the astronomers said.

“The intensity of these X-rays was unexpected and unprecedented,” Neil Gehrels, Swift’s principal investigator at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, said in a statement.

Gehrels said the burst, named GRB 100621A, is the brightest X-ray source that Swift has detected since it started looking for them in 2005.

“Just when we were beginning to think that we had seen everything that gamma-ray bursts could throw at us, this burst came along to challenge our assumptions about how powerful their X-ray emissions can be,” Gehrels said.

“The burst was so bright when it first erupted that our data-analysis software shut down,” said Phil Evans of Britain’s University of Leicester, who discovered the burst when he was going through some recorded data from Swift.

“So many photons were bombarding the detector each second that it just couldn’t count them quickly enough. It was like trying to use a rain gauge and a bucket to measure the flow rate of a tsunami.” When a star explodes, radiation travels at the speed of light in all directions. Gamma rays reach Earth first, followed by X-rays.

This particular one was 140 times brighter than the brightest continuous X-ray source in the sky -- a nearby neutron star.


Reuters




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