(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!

Oh, wait, no, I’m not. Phew.

Sweet desktop though, munches a nice ammount of memory.

p.s. It also looks like it could be the Asguard Head Nebula

@Greg Fish / Phil
“If for some bizarre reason the gamma ray death beam would be pointing at our planet, we might get to feel the heat of this dying giant on our own skin. And that wouldn’t be good.”
So, then, potentially there is an Earth-like (+/-) planet getting cooked?

“Welcome to the Universe – by AdromedasWake”
stunningly beautiful start of a series on the Universe (doh ,)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCAmWibS2bI

watch in HD, it’s worth the wait
greetings from Austria

Just kiddin friends, as we all know, based on current test score statistics, we colonials may be the most uneducated people in the world. How depressing…

You now have my permission to rip this post to shreds )

With all the mass blowee offeee EtC is doing, I wonder how that could affect the stars wobble??? As in, if it loses enough mass, in an irregular distribution, the pole direction might shift enough for it to point a GRB right at us,,,oh goody, now I can have something else to worry about,,,
Oh nose, the sky is falling,,,

GAry 7

“I happen to think there are other things it looks like, but I’m too polite to say just what.”

Hermann Rorschach would have something to say about that.

Yes, but as Freud once said, “sometimes, a nebula is just a nebula.”

MadScientist:

In the 1840’s? Don’t you mean in the (1840 – 7500)’s ? ~

It’s common usage to say an event “took place” at the time the light reached the Earth. It’s just easier to say “in the 1840′s” rather than “in the 1840′s, the light from an event which took place some 7,500 years earlier reached the Earth..”

(1 mile=880 fathoms, or 1/3 of a league)

It’s plasma universe planet formation in action!