Carl Sagan
There are 19 pages on this website covering various aspects of Astronomy, to view them all you can go to the Site Map below
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A Hubble Space Telescope image of Supernova Remnant N 63A, in the Large Magellanic Cloud
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Exploding Star's give out more light than 100 billion Star's combined, and are a great way of pumping energy into space and sending shock waves through gas clouds that could eventually trigger the formation of Star's.
In January 2010 two amateur astronomers in central Florida, US, have discovered a violent explosion of a distant star in our Galaxy.
The two astronomers, Dr. Barbara Harris of New Smyrna Beach and Shawn Dvorak of Clermont, were active participants in a global research campaign to monitor activity of the star U Scorpii. Their detection of this explosion in the early morning hours served as the trigger for a number of satellites and ground-based telescopes waiting on this important event. U Sco, an object known as a recurrent nova, had been predicted to outburst during a two-year window beginning in the spring of 2008. Amateur astronomers around the world will continue to participate in the observing campaign, providing data to complement the observations made by larger ground- and space-based telescopes.
Scientists believe that it was an Asteroid impact that wiped out the Dinosaurs around 65 million years ago. The United States is the only country that currently has an operating survey/detection program for discovering near-Earth objects though Canada and Germany are both building spacecraft that may contribute to the discovery of near-Earth objects. However, neither mission will detect fainter or smaller objects than ground-based telescopes, any one of which could cause short-term devastation to vast areas of our planet
Scientists estimate there are about 100,000 asteroids and comets near Earth, but only about 20,000 are expected to pose any risk of impact. To date NASA has found 6,330 of those objects, 1,000 of them flying in orbits that could potentially threaten the Earth in the future.
Worryingly in 2005 the U.S. congress ordered NASA to find and track 90% of the large asteroids near Earth by 2020, but did not set aside the necessary funds required to do the job.
Surely this project is too serious to be the cause of just one country. All major countries should contribute money and time to the effort. For more see Asteroid Watch
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From July 14 to 16 in the year 2000, the surface of the Sun exploded. Huge, bright flares spewed out into space like powerful fountains colorfully lit from beneath. Within a few hours, the solar storm bombarded Earth with a shower of positively-charged hydrogen atoms, called protons, causing scientific and communications satellites to short-circuit. Through a series of chemical reactions in our atmosphere, the protons drastically diminished the upper-most areas of the ozone layer, a protective blanket mostly in the stratosphere that blocks life-threatening ultraviolet radiation from reaching the Earth. This shower of protons, known by solar science insiders as the Bastille Day event, was the third largest of its kind in the last 30 years.
Just a handful of years ago, astronomers were gazing at a few thousand Galaxies where Stars formed in a bizarre and violent manner. Now the number is in the millions, thanks to more powerful telescopes and supercomputers. Looking up at the skies from our particular spot in the Universe everything seems so quiet, stable, predictable and peaceful. Nothing seems to disturb the tranquility of our heavenly view, except of course the fluctuating spasms of our atmosphere.
Of course all of this is just an illusion based on the incomprehensible vastness of space. Our Universe is teeming with violence, and it is all part of the game in keeping the Universal show on the road.
Our Violent Neighborhood
Our Sun which provides up with life sustaining heat and and light is indeed a fickle protector. Giant explosions and violent storms in its atmosphere, both send out deadly bursts of radiation that would fry us all in a heartbeat. Fortunately our planets magnetic field provides us with an invisible protective shield, thus shielding all life-forms on the planet. The only visible hint of the Sun's ferocity is the glowing curtains of aurora ..the Northern and Southern lights .. where the air above our heads soaks up the final vestiges of a solar attack.
Scientists have expressed their concern that the Solar System may not be as stable as it seems. Jupiter...the big brother of our Solar System... is starting to look like it is in the process of throwing a spanner in the works. Jupiter's huge gravitational influence over the other objects in the Solar System ... especially the smaller planets...have , it seems, been underestimated. It appears that the long-term prospects for the smallest planet Mercury are bleak. The huge gravitational pull of Jupiter seems to be bullying Mercury into a singly eccentric death orbit, possibly flinging the cosmic lightweight into the path of Venus . To make things worse, there might be dire consequences for Earth. The gas giant orbits the Sun at a distance of approximately 5 AU (748 million km), that's 5 times further away from the Sun than the Earth. Although the distance may be huge, this 318 Earth-mass planets gravitational pull is very important to the inner Solar System planets, including tiny Mercury. Computer simulations predict that Mercury's orbit may extend into the path of Venus or it might simply fall into the Sun. Researchers in France and California formulate four possible scenarios as to what may happen as Mercury gets disturbed: It will crash into the Sun, Crash into Earth, Crash into Venus or it will be ejected out of the Solar System.
But before any of us panic we are assured that there is only a 1% chance that these gravitational instabilities of the inner Solar System are likely to cause any kind of chaos before the Sun turns into a Red Giant and swallows Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars in 7 billion years time....phew!
The Big Bang
If we assume that everything the big thinkers in Science tells us is true then then the Big Bang is the first violent event in Universal history.
The Big Bang theory, was formulated in 1922 by the Russian mathematician and meteorologist Alexander Friedmann.
Friedmann began with Einstein's equations of general relativity and found a solution to those equations in which the Universe began in a state of extremely high density and temperature (the so-called Big Bang) and then expanded in time, thinning out and cooling as it did so. Our Universe is thought to have begun as an infinitesimally small, infinitely hot, infinitely dense, something - a singularity. Where did it come from..... we don't know. Why did it appear.... we don't know. According to the standard theory, our Universe sprang into existence around 13.7 billion years ago
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The theoretical 'Big Bang' was perhaps the most violent event that ever happened in our Universe
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There are many misconceptions surrounding the Big Bang theory. For example, we tend to imagine a giant explosion. Experts say that there was no explosion That rather than imagining a balloon popping and releasing its contents, imagine an infinitesimally small balloon expanding to the size of our current Universe.
Another misconception is that we tend to image the Big Bang starting as a little fireball appearing somewhere in space. According to the many experts however, space didn't exist prior to the Big Bang.
Gamma Ray
According to National Geographic news a brilliant burst of Gamma Rays may have caused a mass extinction event on Earth some 440 million years ago—and a similar celestial catastrophe could happen again, according to a new study. Most Gamma-Ray bursts are thought to be streams of high-energy radiation produced when the core of a very massive star collapses. The new computer model shows that a Gamma-Ray burst aimed at Earth could deplete the ozone layer, cause acid rain, and initiate a round of global cooling from as far as 6,500 light-years away.
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Quasars did not come into the collective knowledge of astronomy until the early 1960's.
At first they seemed to be Stars that broadcast radio waves. It was a Dutch/American astronomer named Maarten Schmidt who first analyzed the Quasar light in detail and found that what he was studying wasn't a Star in the Milky Way but something lying billions of light years away.
Quasars are now thought to be powered by super-massive rotating Black Holes at their centers. Because they are the most luminous objects known in the Universe, they are the objects that have been observed at the greatest distances from us. The most distant are so far away that the light we see coming from them was produced when the Universe was only one tenth of its present age.
Eta Carinae is expected to explode as a supernova or hypernova some time within the next million years or so. As its current age and evolutionary path are uncertain, however, it could explode within the next several millennia or even in the next few years.
The Chandra X-ray Observatory, launched in 1999, has yielded superbly detailed images of objects that generate copious amounts of x rays. In many cases, these images reveal the sites of tremendous outbursts such as supernovas, dying stars that blast hot gas into space at velocities of many thousands of miles per second. More sensitive x-ray observations will lead to understanding of the mechanisms through which these explosions occur. Among these mechanisms are the collapse of stellar cores, the sudden destruction of white dwarf stars, and the creation of neutron stars. Neutron stars are made entirely of neutrons and they pack into a region only a few miles across a mass equal to the Sun's.