Chandrasekhar limit
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Cosmology Demystified
That has got to be the single strangest post title I’ve ever written. Of all the whacky branches of science out there, cosmology almost takes the cake — second only, I think, to the downright trippy world of quantum mechanics.…
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How Far Away are Galaxies?
Well, I’ll give you a spoiler: they’re ridiculously far away. Let’s consider for a moment what a light-year actually means. It sounds like a unit of time, but it’s actually the distance that light travels in one Earth year. Think…
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Why Neutron Stars Should Exist
Above is a theoretical rendering of a white dwarf, the collapsed husk of a low-mass or medium-mass star. Interestingly enough, these strange cosmic objects — which begin their existence as intensely hot balls of carbon the size of the Earth…
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What Exactly are Supernovae?
This is one topic I bet you guys have been looking forward to since I first started posting about stellar evolution. Well, I won’t disappoint you! In my last post, we covered how a massive star gets to the point…
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How Massive Stars Die
When people think of star death, they most often think of supernovae (plural for supernova). So why haven’t I spent the past bunch of posts on star death talking about them? Because supernovae are not actually the most common fate…
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What are White Dwarfs?
Now that we’re finally talking about white dwarfs, we’re getting into the really cool stuff. In my last post, we explored planetary nebulae, and we left off with a question: where does the fast wind that forms planetary nebulae come…
