Jeff and Terry Menz from our very own club joined Nicole Gugliucci and Georgia Bracey for the Learning Space Hangout on Google + brought to you by Cosmoquest
Mar 27
Potential ‘Comet of the Century’ Not Brightening as Expected (excerpt)
This is an excerpt from and article By Joe Rao and SPACE.com posted on Scientific American.
Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UMD (Tony Farnham)
The promising Comet ISON continues on its
Comet ISON has stagnated around 16th magnitude for a couple months rather than steadily gaining in brightness as expected. Various signs suggest that the comet’s nucleus is not “healthy”
The promising Comet ISON continues on its way in toward a late November rendezvous with the sun, cosmic close encounter that will bring the celestial object to within 800,000 miles (1.2 million km) of the sun’s surface
Many have already christened ISON as the “Comet of the Century,” but this may be premature, since the comet’s performance will hinge chiefly on whether it can survive its extremely close approach to the sun on Nov. 28. During that encounter, the comet will approach close to the sun’s surface —called the photosphere— while also plunging through its intensely hot corona whose temperature exceeds 1 million degrees Fahrenheit (555,000 degrees Celsius).
Mar 27
Whoa! Mini-Supernovas Discovered (excerpt)
This is an excerpt from an article by Charles Q. Choi for Space.com Follow the link to read full story
Astronomers have discovered a new kind of supernova, a star explosion so weak that scientists dubbed it a miniature stellar blast.
Supernovas represent the deaths of stars, which collapse in powerful explosions. They generally are classified into two main types; the new class, called Type Iax, “is essentially a mini-supernova,” said lead researcher Ryan Foley, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “It’s the runt of the supernova litter.”
Supernovas are the most powerful stellar explosions known to science, visible all the way to the edge of the universe. The first of the two main flavors, Type Ia supernovas, happen after a white dwarf star dies from siphoning off too much mass from a companion star. In contrast, Type II supernovas occur after the core of a star about 10 to 100 times as massive as the sun runs out of fuel and collapses into an extraordinarily dense lump in a fraction of a second, blasting luminous radiation outward.
