http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_speed_of_light

No really it is, Einstein was wrong which is why we have so much trouble with quantum mechanics and no GUT that works.

Take the tokamak for instance, how many stars look like a donut?

Don’t worry, they are very likely listed as co-authors on the paper.

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2008arXiv0802.1712S

Thanks for making the comment for me, so I didn’t have to.

Cheers!

Very cool indeed … & Alicia Soderberg definitely won the Astronomy Lottery. With bells on.

I think it’ll be quite a while before anyone gets this lucky again – although there may be new arrays that can stack the probability deck in our favour in years to come.

“5) If current simulations are to be believed, the core collapse timescale is more like a couple tenths of a second, however by the end, just before the bounce, the matter is falling in as fast as 20% of the speed of light.”

That much matter going from essentially motionless to 20% of the speed of light, in that tiny time scale… is simply incomprehensible to my tiny mind. The energy that has to be involved is just… amazing. No other word for it.

It’s things like this that I think can make science so awe-inspiring, independent of one’s personal philosophies and religious beliefs. The universe is simply stunning, regardless of what (or who) we think brought it about in the first place.

I am feeling very, very tiny right now as I eat my lunchtime salad and read all this, but very, very big as I feel privileged that I/we can observe and appreciate what’s happening.

1) The carbon in the Solar System was probably made in Red Giants, but any silicon observed in a Red Giant was made in a prior star.

2) Core collapse supernovae are responsible for the Solar System composition of Oxygen, Magnesium, Silicon, Sulfur, Calcium and their neighbors. CC SN are also responsible for roughly half of all Iron-Nickel-Cobalt elements in the solar system. These are all observed in supernova remnants.

3) Elements heavier that iron are made in two processes, the s-process, which occurs in Red Giants, and the r-process. In both cases, these heavy fusion reactions require energy input, thus they can not provide energy to the hydrostatic stellar core. In both cases, these heavy elements are made in small amounts in regions dominated by helium and other light elements.

4) While we understand the r-process pretty well on a microscopic level, we have quite a few potential places this could occur, including merging neutron stars and several variations of supernovae. All of these scenarios currently have significant problems, so there is room to argue in favor of your favorite. Unfortunately, the r-process represents such a small part of the ejected mass, it’s very unlikely to directly observe r-process elements in any of these events.

5) If current simulations are to be believed, the core collapse timescale is more like a couple tenths of a second, however by the end, just before the bounce, the matter is falling in as fast as 20% of the speed of light.

You’re exactly right. This occurred roughly 84 million years ago, local time.