Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Photos of space always blew me away. They looked awesome! And they got even better when telescopes like Hubble were placed in space thereby avoiding the dust and the atmospheric distortions that earth-bound telescopes suffer from. Take a look at these pics below to see what I mean: But after a while, such pics lose a bit of their charm because there are so many of them on the Net and also because you start to remember that the colours on the pics are computer generated ones. Which is when I started appreciating the informative pics. Like take supernovas. When they explode, they are said to emit the light comparable to the entire galaxy they are a part of. That’s a bit hard to believe, isn’t it? Surely they are exaggerating. And then I saw this pic: See that light at the center of the pic? That’s the light of about ten billion stars at the center of the galaxy. Now see that light at the bottom left corner? That’s a supernova! As bright as ten billion stars,...

Note : Even though this blog talks about how stars die, you don’t need to know or even care about physics to (hopefully) enjoy it. Most stars, including our sun, will run out of fuel and then the light will go off. Pretty tame. Then there are the bigger stars that could end up as white dwarfs or neutron stars. These stars, once they run out of fuel, get compressed to extraordinary densities and eventually all that compressed and heated matter begins to glow. But once it has radiated away the heat, it’s over. That’s more interesting than the ultimate fate of our sun, but not exactly riveting stuff either. Next come the supernovas: even more massive stars that literally blow themselves up at the end. Spectacular to watch no doubt but very dangerous if one happens too close to home because of all that radiation. Somewhat like the way suicide bombers die, except the star didn’t “want” to kill itself or others around it. Until now, I thought supernovas are the most specta...