(February 13th, 2009 at 1:13 am)
“The star in question [Eta Carinae] has the mass of over 100 suns so spewing out just two sun’s worth is only a little more than a cosmic belch. It still retains around 99% of its heft. If stars about 10 times as massive as the Sun, shed a significant percentage of their mass, go out with a bang and collapse into black holes, imagine what a monster ten times that can do.”

Very true indeed. However, one minor pedantic nit pick though – a * ten * solar mass star which is the lowest mass star to produce a type II supernova would NOT leave a black hole but would produce a neutron star instead. (Okay the boundary is around eight to ten solar masses to be precise.)

Such a star would begin its life as about spectral type B1~B2 before running through its core hydrogen, swelling up to red supergianthood as a Helium fusing first and then second ascent supergiant. It would then be a red hot vacuum in its outer layers but in its super-dense, super-hot core, the star would fuse elements past just the ordinary helium into carbon, carbon into oxygen. It would “burn” oxygen into neon & magnesium, neon-magnesium into silicon & sulphur and finally sulphur-Silicon into iron …

.. At which point the nuclear fusion process takes more energy than produces causing the core to implode, the outer layers of the star rebound off it &

:large fonts

BBOOOOOOOMMMM!!! :/large:

We have a new supernova!

Then a new neutron star for this lower mass high mass star .. Maybe a pulsar or magnetar.

Or for a *higher* high mass star perhaps a black hole!

—-
PS. Hope the large font size works – how do you get large fonts here?

Suggestion to the BA – can we have a “how to” list somewhere here with font sizes, image posting, bold, italics emoticons etc .. ? Please?

Its already midday on the 15th Feb today here in Adelaide, South Australia anyway.

& noting Eta Carinae could end not merely in a supernova but even produce a hypernova blast instead!

PS. Happy 445th birthday to Galileo Galilei, discoverer of the Galilean moons of Jupiter (Io, Europa, Ganymede & Callisto), the phases of Venus, sunspots, Lunar craters and more; the original astronomical telescopic observer, improver of the Galilean telescope named in his honour*, improver of the compass, advocate of the Copernican heliocentric theory, “father of Science” itself.

* Invented though by others – a contentious issue with Hans Lippershey (or Lipperhey spellings vary) being first to patent the design but rivals appearing almostsimultaneously.

Somewhere between four to five * million * times as brightas the Sun, dramatically explosive, surrounded by many shells of nebulosity -the homunculus, the keyhole, the HST-imaged lobes with a thin white hot disk separating them. A binary we’ve just found with a Wolf-Rayet star (probably?) that shed its outer layers in a titanic explosion making it briefly a rival to Sirius and gretaer than Canopus – even as seen from Earth seven thousand five hundred odd light years away. Pairedwitha supermassive B-type (probably) supergiant star with around 100 times our Sun’s mass and .. just .. Wow!

This extreme awe-inspiring star still blows my mind every time I think about it!

Its my hope that in this the International Year of Astronomy ‘09 Eta Carinae finally does explode safely but spectacularly as a Wolf-Rayet supernova and showers down a whole wealth of marvellous scientific information for us to enjoy. Of course, the odds of ithappening this year are very long and its highly unlikely; but until Dec. 31st I’ll be hoping for it! I’d certainly love to see Eta Carinae explode within my lifetime .. providing we don’t cop any damage which I really don’t think we will.

Thanks for posting that image for us, BA – its much appreciated.

Please, Phil, use SI-units instead of imperial units

yeah, especially since the empire was crushed by the rebellion and now we have the new Republic!