Curious Cosmos #2: What’s the rest of a star exploding in Supernova?

For thousands of years, humanity has observed the night sky in search of answers and sometimes Paradise itself responded with an impressive show: A star, once infinite and quiet, suddenly shone more than others, just disappeared over time.

“What he called the” stars invited “in the old records of the ancient Chinese was actually enormous explosions: Supernoves.”

These explosions are not just cosmic fireworks. These are the last, violent and magnificent moments of some stars’ lives. But after all, when a star dies like that, what’s left? To understand what is left, we must first understand what happened.

Stars, Like the sun, they shine due to nuclear fusion in their seeds. In the case of very large stars – those with at least eight times the sun mass – this process increases heavier elements: first hydrogen helium, then carbon, oxygen, until iron reaches. And there is a problem.

Iron financing consumes energy instead of release. This means that the star has lost the main support source against gravity by forming a iron core. Conclusion Fast and severe explosion: Core collapses in milliseconds and outer layers were thrown into space In an incredibly energetic explosion – a supernova.

During this event, within seconds, the temperature may exceed 100 billion Kelvin and shine more than an entire galaxy for stars days or weeks. The released energy is the order of 10^44 Joule, which is the equivalent of the energy of the sun emitted at the same time.

Now the fascinating part is coming: Not everything is star dust. It depends on the mass of the remaining original star.

A supernova ruins

Neutron

If the remaining nucleus is between 1.4 and 3 times the solar mass, gravity compresses the neutrons, shaping, shaping, shaping, shaping the protons and electrons.

Conclusion This is a neutron star: An object with a diameter of about 20 kilometers, but so busy that one teaspoon of the material is more than one billion tons.

These stars quickly rotate and give radiation bundles – When observed from the earth, we see them as pulsar.

Black hole

If the remaining core is even larger, no neutron resists. Gravity wins everything and creates a black hole – A area where the density is infinite and even the light cannot escape.

A typical star of the black hole of the activity horizon (“non -return dot”) radius is only a few kilometers, but the effect of gravity can extend to thousands of kilometers.

These explosions are very important for the existence of life, although it is destructive. Elements such as calcium, iron, gold and uranium found in our bones were beaten in the intestines of these stars and thrown into space by Supernova. Carl Sagan was right: really made of star dust.

Supernova’s modern observation gained strength in the twentieth century. In 1934, physicists Walter Baade and Fritz Zwicky proposed the idea that Supernova produced neutron stars.

Ten years later, in 1987, A supernova in the Great Magalhães cloud, which can be seen with the naked eye, provided valuable data to astronomers in neutrinosParticles without mass that leaves the explosion even before light. This determination confirmed the theoretical models and opened the “neutrinos astronomy” period.

Today, telescopes such as Hubble and X-ray observations and gravity waves continue to examine supernovs and residues. Astronomers analyze the light spectra, measure the expansion of gases, and even look for gravitational waves produced in star collapse.

In addition, artificial intelligence supernova – explosions in binary systems – used as “standard candles” To measure cosmic distancesIt helps to discover the accelerated expansion of the universe and the presence of dark energy.

So what’s left of a exploding star? It may be a neutron star that rotates thousands of rotations per second or a black hole hidden in space -time fabric.

It could be a bright nebula, Famous Crab Nebula – A bright skeleton of a Supernova, which was observed by Chinese astronomers in 1054, and even you, me and all the elements that make us.

Supernova, the end of a star story, but also the beginning of others. In the wonderful stage of Kozmos, every Star Death writes a new scene in the scenario of existence. And the universe, ultimately made of stories – some are explosive, but they are all fascinating.