Description
Transcript: On February 23, 1987, Oscar du Halde stepped outside his telescope to check the sky conditions at the Las Companas Observatory in Chile. He saw a new star near 30 Doradus nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small galaxy near the Milky Way. Homo sapiens were just developing on the plains of Africa a hundred and seventy thousand years ago when the blast wave from a dying star started out. The star was a blue super giant, twenty times the mass of the Sun, and as it exploded its iron plasma core collapsed from the size of Mars down to a size of about a hundred kilometers. The temperature exceeded 30 billion Kelvin, and the iron nuclei fragmented, and the explosion released a blast of neutrinos. A hundred and seventy thousand years passed; neutrinos and light traveled through space. The neutrinos arrived first, 10 billion passing through the body of every person on Earth. Delicate sensors detected the neutrinos in Japan and the United States. The light arrived a few hours later, and telescopes on Earth, on the Mir space station, and on satellite observatories focused their eyes on the dying star.
Transcript: A fundamental prediction of General Relativity is the fact that time slows down in strong gravitational fields. The ultimate test of this idea would be to observe someone falling into a black hole carrying a clock. In theory, the clock would slow down and come to a complete halt as...
Published 07/25/11
Transcript: Any change in a gravitational field or gravitational configuration causes ripples in space time to be emitted. These disturbances which travel at the speed of light are called gravity waves or gravitational radiation. Pulsars slow down slightly in their periods, and this corresponds...
Published 07/25/11
Transcript: If you throw an object up into the air it will eventually slow down and fall back to Earth. The object is losing kinetic energy by trying to climb out through the gravitational field of the Earth. Photons also lose energy as they climb out of the pit of gravity. This effect is...
Published 07/25/11