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In 1930, Chandra, an Indian student showed mathematically that massive stars explode into a supernova and then collapse down into neutron stars,or black holes. Before that Scientists assumed that all stars collapsed into white dwarfs when they died. Chandra’s theory was ridiculed as ‘absurd’.
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When people say “go out with a bang”, they usually don’t mean literally. But when it comes to dying stars, typically astronomers expect them to go out with enormous bangs: supernovae. However, recently a group of Ohio University scientists observed a star that didn’t have quite the same life path in mind.
Instead of exploding and then collapsing in on itself, the star turned directly into a black hole. That shocked the group of scientists who had been studying the star, named N6946-BH1 to be exact, which was located in the Fireworks Galaxy, 22 million light-years away. At first they didn’t think it was possible, yet in 2015, after six years of watching the star weaken, scientists concluded that the star had bizarrely skipped the supernova stage.
They chalked it up as a “massive fail.” That’s a technical term, referring to the star’s mass.
“The typical view is that a star can form a black hole only after it goes supernova,” said Ohio State astronomy professor and study researcher Christopher Kochanek. “If a star can fall short of a supernova and still make a black hole, that would help explain why we don’t see supernovae from the most massive stars.”
Photo Credit: Pexels
This atypical event still requires more analysis, but scientist Scott Adams estimates that massive fails occur in about 10 to 30 percent of massive stars. Ultimately, this discovery could lead to more answers about how super-massive black holes come to exist, since supernovae tend to blow away a lot of a star’s mass.
Without a supernova, more of a star’s mass would stick around to collapse in on itself and become a vortex that bends time and space and eats light for supper.
The post Wow! Astronomers Watched a Star Skip the Supernova Stage and Go Straight to Black Hole. appeared first on UberFacts.
Humans have always been trying to figure out where we come from. How did we get here, and why do we look the way that we do?
One trait that sets humans apart from other apes is the ability to walk upright. Proto-humans began to walk upright about 6 million years ago. According to one theory, the ability likely gave us an evolutionary advantage — it allowed us to excel at hunting in the savanna, because we were able to see prey at a distance.
But where did the ability come from? Scientists believe that the ability to walk upright is due to a gene mutation on chromosome 17. An event in ancient history must have selected for this mutation, but it’s not clear was it was.
In The Journal of Geology, scientists propose that the event was an ancient supernova.
Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons
It may seem unlikely that a faraway exploding star could have affected our evolutionary development, but the theory is surprisingly easy to understand.
According to the theory, a star detonated near the Earth and showered the planet with energetic cosmic rays, which in turn increased the amount of highly energetic particles in the atmosphere. As a result, lightning strikes become a lot more common. Lightning strikes are the biggest natural cause of wildfires. Wildfires create treeless savannas. Treeless savannas are where upright-walking humans found success because being able to see over the tall grass was such a benefit.
This theory may seem farfetched, but the timeline matches up — the geological record shows an increase in forest fires 7-8 million years ago, just a million years before humans began walking upright. Also, a separate ancient supernova event was possibly connected to an increase in wildfires.
Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons
It’ll be a long time before anyone knows whether this theory is valid or not — for one, scientists would have to wait for a modern supernova to put the lightning theory to any practical test.
Nonetheless, the idea that human evolution could be affected by the stars isn’t so far-fetched after all!
The post Some Scientists Think Humans Began Walking Upright Because of an Ancient Supernova appeared first on UberFacts.
After Betelgeuse goes supernova, it will be brighter than a full moon and visible during the day. It will shine for weeks/months before fading away. It will likely explode within a million years.
