How big is the Universe? (Creator, God, Allah, Qur'an)

[Cordoba]

Closer to the Heart - 47 Tucanae

Written by Tammy Plotner



Those huge, gravitationally bound balls of stars know as globular clusters aren't without a heart.

Containing a thick concentration of 10,000 to more than a million stars in a region spanning just 10 to 30 light-years, globular clusters are more akin to seething masses of suns where the lightweights head for the outer edges while the giants collect in the core. What causes this process? Do globular clusters really have a way of getting some stars closer to the heart?

What you see here is 47 Tucanae, the second largest globular cluster in the Milky Way's busy galactic halo. As its name "47 Tucanae" implies, its core was first cataloged as a star and numbered the 47th in Tucana the Toucan - but not for long. On September 14, 1751 a French astronomer named Nicholas Louis de Lacaille was the first to discover its true nature with a half inch diameter spy glass and cataloged it as nebulous object. Next to observe and catalog it were James Dunlop in 1826, and John Herschel in 1834 when it became New General Catalog (NGC) 104.

At home some 13,400 to 16,000 light years away from our Earth, this inconceivably dense concentration of at least a million stars spans 120 light years at the outside, yet at its heart is more than 15,000 individual stars that are packed so densely that you couldn't fit our solar system between them. Believed to have all been born about the same time from the same cloud of gas, globular clusters like 47 Tucanae are a wonderful study of how stars evolve and interact.

http://www.universetoday.com/2008/05/19/closer-to-the-heart-47-tucanae/

[Cordoba]

Scientists see supernova in action


Supernova 2007uy in the galaxy NGC2770 was already several weeks old on January 7, 2008 when NASA's Swift satellite took the image at left. The image on the right was taken two days later and shows Supernova 2008D as well. (NASA Swift Team)

A star trembled on the brink of eternity. Outwardly all was serene, but its inside was falling into chaos.

Far away on the day of Jan. 9, Earth time, a satellite telescope by the name of Swift, which happened to be gazing at the star's galaxy, a smudge of stars 88 million light-years away in the constellation Lynx, recorded an unexpected burst of invisible X-rays 100 billion times as bright as the Sun.

The supernova was of a sort known as Type Ibc, the rarest and most luminous of the explosions caused by the collapse of the cores of massive stars, the astronomers have concluded. Another kind, known as Type Ia supernovas, are believed to result from the destruction of much smaller stars and are beloved of cosmologists who use them to track the expansion of the universe and effects of dark energy.

The star that died last January could have been 20 times as massive as the Sun or even bigger, Soderberg said. It was probably a type called a Wolf-Rayet star. They are very hot stars with surface temperatures of 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit or more and are often blowing gas away in strong winds. Soderberg described them as "very violent stars, very massive."

Because it is gravity that stokes the thermonuclear furnace at the centers of stars, the more massive they are, the younger they die. In the case of a star 10 or 20 times as massive as the Sun, it could be only a few million years. "These stars live fast and die young. We don't know if they leave a beautiful corpse," Kirshner said.

Many of the elements necessary for life and its accessories, like carbon, oxygen, iron and gold, are produced in a thermonuclear frenzy during the final stages of these explosions, which then fling them into space to be incorporated into new stars, new planets, new creatures.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/05/22/healthscience/22nova.php

[ben d]

The star that died last January ....

Yes,... and as proof to the truth behind the doctrine on reincarnation, there will be a rebirth emerging from the remnants!