Things that make life worth living → Our Galaxy
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awesomepeoplehangingouttogether:
Vincent Price and Alice Cooper
It’s called sonoluminescence. No one knows exactly why this occurs, but there are a lot of different hypotheses. One of the most common explanations is that when the bubble collapses, the air inside gets pressurized. Increasing the pressure on a gas increases the temperature of the gas. During sonoluminescence, the temperature inside the tiny bubbles becomes so great that the gas begins to glow.
Another hypothesis is that the collapsing bubble lends energy to prolong the life of the otherwise quickly annihilating photons that are spontaneously generated in a vacuum. Sonoluminescence could also be the product of the way photons can pop into and out of existence; the sudden collapse of the bubble making the photons noticeable to those in the macro world(via I Fucking Love Science/fb)
(Source: sioku, via distraction)
(Source: FANTASIA, via distraction)
This Week in Science - April 29 - May 5, 2013:
- Smallest movie ever made here.
- Sea horse armor inspires engineers here.
- New insect-eye-like-camera here.
- Bioengineered windpipe here.
- Bionic ear here.
- Anti-matter falling up here.
- Harvard robotocists fly RoboBee here.
- Saturn’s seasonal magnetosphere here.
- Vega launches here.
- Climate change causing painted turtles extinction here.
- Black hole birth observed for first time here.
- New species of mole rat here.
A new kind of cosmic flash may reveal something never seen before: the birth of a black hole.
According to well-established theory, when a massive star dies, its core collapses under its own weight. As it collapses, the protons and electrons that make up the core merge and produce neutrons. This collapsing process also creates neutrinos, which are particles that zip through almost all matter at nearly the speed of light. As the neutrinos stream out from the core, they carry away a lot of energy, representing about a tenth of the sun’s mass.This rapid loss of mass means that the gravitational strength of the dying star’s core would abruptly drop (according to a little-known paper written in 1980 by Dmitry Nadezhin). When that happens, the outer gaseous layers, mainly hydrogen, still surrounding the core would rush outward, generating a shock wave that would hurtle through the outer layers at about 1,000 kilometers per second (more than 2 million miles per hour).
Tony Piro, a postdoctoral scholar at California Institute of Technology, examines in his new study what might happen at the moment when the shock wave hits the star’s surface. “That flash is going to be very bright, and it gives us the best chance for actually observing that this event occurred,” he explains. It would be luminous enough to be detectable in nearby galaxies. The flash, which would shine for 3 to 10 days before fading, would be very bright in optical wavelengths.
Piro estimates that astronomers should be able to see one of these events per year on average. Surveys that watch the skies for flashes of light like supernovae, such as the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF), are well suited to discover these unique events. The intermediate Palomar Transient Factory (iPTF), which improves on the PTF and just began surveying in February, may be able to find a couple of these events per year.
(via dirrtyflowerchild)
