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Black Holes and Gamma Rays Farthest Located 10 billion light-years from Earth. A Supernova SN1997ff (extremely luminous Type IIn supernova) is the FARTHEST supernova ever discovered in 1997 during a second observation of a portion of the northern Hubble Deep Field - a region of the sky which was looked at previously in 1995 by the Hubble telescope. The expansion since the Big Bang - began slowing down after the Big Bang but later it again began to expand about 5-7 billion years ago. Dark energy was proposed by Albert Einstein's "cosmological constant" in his theory of relativity to be the repulsive force which is causing expansion (or stretching) of the universe. "The supernova appears to be one of a special class of explosions that allows astronomers to understand how the universe's expansion has changed over time, much as the way a parent follows a child's growth spurts by marking a doorway," Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Maryland said in a prepared statement. (Robin Lloyd, Science Editory - Space.com - April 2, 2001) Brightest NASA reveals images of brightest supernova: "It's really unlike anything we've ever seen before." "The violent explosion was observed by ground-based telescopes as well as NASA's orbiting Chandra X-Ray Observatory in a galaxy far from our own Milky Way. But the observations hint that an erupting star in our own galaxy, called Eta Carinae, could be close to the same kind of blast, astronomers say in a paper to be published in The Astrophysical Journal." (NASA as reported in NBC News) The star that blew up was 240 million light-years from Earth, in a galaxy called NGC 1260. Using adaptive infra red optics at the Lick Observatory, ANOTHER Supernovae SN 2006gy, the BRIGHTEST ever was more recently observed in galaxy NGC 1260. Typical sightings of which reach their peak brightness in a few days or weeks and then fade this supernova took over two months to peak and stayed super luminescent for over three months which was longer than any other previously observed supernova. It was reported by the Lick Observatory that it remained as bright as a typical supernova almost 8 months later and it manifested more brilliance than its host galaxy NGC 1260 about 240 million light-years away. The mass was estimated by UC Berkeley post-doc fellows Nathan Smith and David Pooley to be between 100 and 200 times the mass of our sun. This is a massive star. Our own Milky Way galaxy only contains about a dozen stars with that much mass out of about 400 billion stars. "This was a truly monstrous explosion, a hundred times more energetic than a typical supernova," said Smith, who led a team of astronomers from UC Berkeley and the University of Texas. "That means the star that exploded might have been as massive as a star can get, about 150 times that of our sun. We've never seen that before." (Robert Sanders, UC Berkeley Press Release - "Largest, brightest supernova discovered" May 2007 - http://berkeley.edu/news/) "Of all exploding stars ever observed, this was the king," said Alex Filippenko, UC Berkeley astronomer and leader of the ground-based observations at the University of California's Lick Observatory in California and the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii. "We were astonished to see how bright it got, and how long it lasted." (ibid) "Based on the Lick and Keck observations, plus data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory, Smith, Pooley, Filippenko and their colleagues argue that the stellar explosion was not your run-of-the-mill supernova, but a possible pair-instability supernova." (ibid) Massive stars produce so much gamma ray radiation in their cores that is converted to particle and anti-particle pairs. Anti-particles annihilate particles and there is a drop in radiaion causing the star to collapse from its own weight. The collapes literally causes a meltdown of and thermonuclear reaction blowing the star into space, thus resulting in a supernovae. The stars with masses which are at least 10X more than our own sun end their lives as supernovae. "Stars with masses at least 10 times greater than our sun end their lives after burning hydrogen to helium, helium to carbon, and on to larger elements until they reach iron, when fusion stops. Toward the end of this process, the heat produced in the core of the star becomes insufficient to support the outer layers, which collapse inward, finishing the fusion process and crunching the core to a neutron star or black hole. The outer layers of the star are blown off in a bright flare-up we observe as a supernova." (ibid) "For stars much more massive than this, ranging from 140 solar masses to as many as 250, the temperature at the core becomes so great that before the fusion cascade is complete, high-energy gamma rays in the core start annihilating one another, creating matter-antimatter pairs, mostly electron-positron pairs. Since gamma radiation is the energy that prevents collapse of the outer layers of the star, once the radiation starts disappearing, the outer layers fall inward. The net result is a thermonuclear explosion that, theoretically, would be brighter than any typical supernova. In this type of supernova, the star is blown to smithereens, leaving behind no black hole." (ibid) In lieu of becoming a black hole they can, like this one, explode and stay bright for a long time. They also produce heavy elements Most of the universe's early stars were supermassive and seeded the universe with their heavy elements which became planets. "We may have witnessed a modern-day version of how the first generation of the most massive stars ended their lives, when the universe was very young," Filippenko said." (ibid) "University of Texas graduate student Robert Quimby, a UC Berkeley alumnus, first observed the supernova on Sept. 18, 2006 in the galaxy NGC 1260, located in the constellation Perseus. Filippenko's team immediately began observing it with its dedicated supernova search and monitor telescope at Lick, the Katzman Automatic Imaging Telescope." (ibid) Spectra of the supernovae was obtained using the Lick 3 meter Shane telescope and the DEIMOS spectograph which is mounted on the Keck II telescope. X-ray observations were made by the Chandra X-ray telescope. NASA manages the Chandra program. Since its launch on July 23, 1999, the Chandra X-ray Observatory has been NASA's flagship mission for X-ray astronomy, taking its place in the fleet of "Great Observatories." The Chandra observatory is among NASA's fleet of the "Great Observatories" and was designed to detect X-ray emissions from high energy hot regions of the universe with exploding stars, clusters of galaxies and the matter around black holes. X-rays are absorbed by the Earth's atomosphere. Chandra launched in July of 1999 is in orbit about the atmosphere in high earth eliptical orbit at an altitude of 86,500 miles (139,000 km) is the most sophisticated X-ray observatory ever built providing pictures 25 times sharper than previous X-rays. The orbit takes the observatory one third of the way to the moon and as close as 9,942 miles to the Earth. The time to complete an orbit is 64 hours and 18 minutes. "...[T]he supernova was 100 times more energetic than usual. Such a phenomenon would require the violent destruction of a star 150 times more massive than our sun -- which is near the theoretical limit for a single star's size." (NASA) ...[T]he observations of SN 2006gy hint that the biggest stars can go off like giant thermonuclear bombs at the end of their lives...." "For all its similarities, Eta Carinae is markedly different from SN 2006gy in that it's much closer. Eta Carinae is only 7,500 light-years from Earth, or about 45 quadrillion miles away -- which may sound like a long way in earthly terms, but isn't all that distant for a cosmic supernova." (NASA) It could happen tomorrow or a 1,000 years from now - or maybe today? "Astronomers have said a stellar explosion in Earth's celestial neighborhood could touch off a mass extinction -- in fact, some scientists have proposed that just such a scenario could explain an extinction that took place 440 million years ago...." (MSNBC) Expansion and Vastness of the Universe The Earth can be swallowed up a black hole. A black hole travelling in our Milky Way Galaxy at four times faster than any stars around it, an event invisible yet there is ample evidence of it's existence. It is also the result of a Supernova, the death of an exploding star. This particular Black Hole is about 6,000 light years away and it is headed this way. "This is the first black hole found to be moving fast through the plane of our galaxy," said Felix Mirabel, a researcher at the French Atomic Energy Commission. So, how close will it come to the Earth and when. Sometime in the next 230 million years and likely won't be closer than 1,000 light years but know that there are about a million of these black holes in just our own galaxy AND there are a lot of exploding stars some of which becoming supernovaes spewing death rays and heavy matter across the universe. Super solar flares, exploding stars, astroids and meterors all pose a possible threat to Earth and this solar system. Nothing is forever! We know now that there are fewer atoms in the universe and we don't know much about dark matter and dark energy but whether or not we can identify everything in the universe - what it is not is nothingness. The universe has something in it. It also contains a lot of dust and we're also depositing a lot of space junk in space. Time also has no absolute meaning except as a measure of change. In space there is no time. Time is only relative to the observer. We age, therefore we are aware of our time because it is relative to how we change. "Neither space nor time has any existence outside the system of evolving relationships that comprises the universe..." (Three Roads to Quantum Gramity, Lee Smolin) The view which is widely accepted is the "standard model", also known as the "big bang" theory. The universe began with an abrupt expansion of matter (and antimatter) 13.7 billion years ago. There may be other universes. This is called the multiverse theory and many universes may exist as bubbles in space simultaneously. "Recently, NASA has made some astounding discoveries which lend themselves to the proof of the Big Bang theory. Most importantly, astronomers using the Astro-2 observatory were able to confirm one of the requirements for the foundation of the universe through the Big Bang. In June, 1995, scientists were able to detect primordial helium, such as deuterium, in the far reaches of the universe. These findings are consistent with an important aspect of the Big Bang theory that a mixture of hydrogen and helium was created at the beginning of the universe." (Chris LaRocco and Blair Rothstein - Big Bang) "The origin of the Big Bang theory can be credited to Edwin Hubble. Hubble made the observation that the universe is continuously expanding. He discovered that a galaxys velocity is proportional to its distance. Galaxies that are twice as far from us move twice as fast. Another consequence is that the universe is expanding in every direction. This observation means that it has taken every galaxy the same amount of time to move from a common starting position to its current position. Just as the Big Bang provided for the foundation of the universe, Hubbles observations provided for the foundation of the Big Bang theory." (The Big Bang, by Chris LaRocco and Blair Rothstein) "At about one-hundredth of a second, the earliest time about which we can speak with any confidence, the temperature of the universe was about a hundred thousand million degrees Centigrade." (The First Three Minutes, Steven Weinberg - 1977) "Fortunately for us, there was an asymmetry in favor of matter. As a direct result of an excess of about one part per billion, the universe was able to mature in a way favorable for matter to persist. As the universe first began to expand, this discrepancy grew larger. The particles which began to dominate were those of matter. They were created and they decayed without the accompaniment of an equal creation or decay of an antiparticle." (Chris LaRocco and Blair Rothstein) We don't know what caused the Big Bang, but we do know we exist today; that all matter exists today because of an imbalance in matter to antimatter at the time of creation. Our sun is only one of about 200 billion suns in our galaxy, the Milky Way - which is only one galaxy in hundreds of billions of galaxies in the Universe? The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) site estimates there are hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe. Fraser Cain, who along with Pamella Gay, produce one of my favorite astronomy podcast series also wrote the following about the number of galaxies in the universe: "Our Earth feels like all there is, but we know that it's just a tiny planet in a vast Solar System. And our Solar System is just one member of a vast Milky Way galaxy with 200 to 400 million stars. But how many galaxies are there in the entire Universe?...A recent German supercomputer simulation put that number even higher: 500 billion. In other words, there could be a galaxy out there for every star in the Milky Way." (Cain) "We live in a giant spiral galaxy, the Milky Way Galaxy, of 100,000 light years diameter and a mass of roughly a trillion solar masses; our Sun is one of several 100 billions of stars of the Milky Way. The nearest dwarf galaxies, satellites of the Milky Way, are only a few 100,000 light years distant (and closer in case of some dwarfs which are currently merged with the Milky Way), while the nearest giant neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy (M31), also a spiral, is about 2-3 million light years distant." There are black holes and gamma rays headed right for us! Hank Roth Comments | Trackbacks All quoting per the Fair Use Doctrine for educational and discussion purposes pursuant to Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, Copyright Law. AddThis Permalink: http://inyourface.info/ArT/Sci/CoS.shtml Today is Monday August 31, 2009 G 0 l e m D e s i g n s Hank Roth (on the Internet since 1982) Worm Hole (Home) - The Crypt - Hank Roth (Bio) [viewed 1002 times]
