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senerii:

Milky Way @ Kuala Penyu Sabah by Sam’s Digital Shoe Box on Flickr.

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weareallstarstuff:

Star Formation In Orion Nebula

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karrova:

Peter Elson

One of the most mesmerizing, beautiful music videos.

the-science-llama:

Reflection and Emission Nebulas
— Rho Ophiuchi Cloud Complex

Credit: Gerald Rhemann // Astrostudio

(via ne0ndreams)

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highlandtimes:

systemofadowny:

joedirt94:

Black hole eating a star

But they don’t know what a black hole looks like because there is no light so we can’t see it, we just see a black space don’t we?

Black Holes for Dummies: a short essay There are a few things we know about black holes. We know that they have an infinite density. We know that they are created when gravity overcomes the mass of an object. We know they are usually produced by something gaseous, like a nebula (gas cluster) or even a star (ignited gas cluster). We know that they’re black because the gravity is so tough it doesn’t allow light particles to leave its vicinity.
A black hole is made when there is more mass in an object than volume allowing density to reach a limit of infinity. Since density is the measure of mass (which is basically the the number of protons and neutrons-which have nearly the same weight anyway) per unit volume (which is the amount of dimensional space occupied by an object), if you have 10 grams of sand filling a 10 milliliter box, then the density of the sand is 1 g/ml. Now imagine if you have 10 megatons of sand in a 10 milliliter box, your density would be 10,000,000,000,000 g/ml, which is a lot. If you put that into some precalculus limit equation, you could say that the density (mass/volume) would be close to infinity. That is how a black hole comes to be. When there is just too much of something in a small space.
The reason this happens is due to gravity. Scientists, since Isaac Newton, have agreed that gravity is a force that pulls into the center of a large object (which is why people in Australia don’t fall into the sky, gravity pulls them into the center of the earth). This view is generally understood by everyone, but not too many people understand why fat people don’t have their own gravitational fields (which is a common ‘Yo momma’ joke). Well, they do. Everyone and everything has a gravitational field. Gravity, for some reason (the question that Albert Einstein took with him to the grave, actually, and is still being asked by high level quantum physicists), is related to energy in mass. Some could link it to nuclear energy and the way subatomic particles stick together (making gravity a very small, but very strong force), others would say it’s closer to electromagnetic energy and the way magnets stick together (making gravity a very large, but weak force). Einstein and a bunch of other scientists have lived and died trying to build a relation between all three to get something called the Unified Field Theory. All we know is that every single atom has a bit of gravity, and when a lot of atoms are together, their gravity gets stronger with relation to the distance between them (ie: the closer they are, the stronger their accumulated gravity becomes). So imagine 10 megatons of sand in a milliliter box. With the density being near infinity, the gravity produced by the object grows as well, pulling in more objects that only makes it stronger.
So what in the universe is able to produce such a thing? Well, let’s think a bit about how a star is formed. First of all, we have to learn what a nebula is. If you ever wondered what those pretty colorful clouds in space are, they are nebulas. A nebula is a cloud of gas and space dust. They can range in size from the size of a small minivan to a lot larger than the entire solar system. They are held together by the gravity of their components and can often erupt to create a star or even more devastatingly, a black hole. In case it isn’t already clear to you, I’ll explain further on how both happen.
Stars are not just gas being burnt (combustion), they are a result of a huge nuclear explosion that occur when atoms slam into each other at a high enough speed. They are fueled by their components and can live for billions of years (our sun, which is a star, is calculated to be about 4.6 billion years old). Stars go through many phases throughout their lives, and die to become one of three shapes: a dwarf star, a neutron star, or a black hole, depending on their mass.
Black holes, as explained earlier, are a result of the components of a nebula being so close together that they start to stick together and form a very strong gravitational field. This field later becomes stronger as the particles get closer and can get so strong that it becomes impossible to break. Matter of fact, the force needed for light and heat to leave this cluster of mass is overturned by the force of gravity. If light were able to escape a black hole, it wouldn’t be a black hole (black is the lack of color, unlike what white people of America in the 60s thought, calling black people colored and whatnot, when in fact, brown, blue, and green eyes, red, yellow, and brown hair, and pink, peach and white skin, are very colorful, but that’s beside the point).
In conclusion, black holes are created by large masses combining for an even larger force of gravity. They are produced by either the death of a star or in a nebula, and are black because light can’t escape them. Scientists use all of this knowledge, along with a ton I didn’t mention, to predict the shape and other characteristics of a black hole, just as scientists of ancient times were able to predict the circumference of the earth (with a 2% error, and yes, they knew the earth was round long before Columbus). Scientists were also able to discover that black holes spin along an axis, can have orbiting objects around them (such as our solar system), and can be put in orbit themselves. But we shouldn’t worry about walking about into a black hole while walking down the street, we also shouldn’t worry about the earth accidentally floating into one, and we should not worry about some European research center conducting an experiment that could end the world (CERN and its LHC).

Finally someone gets it

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