Aboard The International Space Station This Morning, Astronaut Kimiya Yui Of The Japan Aerospace Exploration

1946 inflation in Hungary.

Stars come in all shapes, colors and SIZES!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEheh1BH34Q

http://www.sbau.org/planets.htm

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Star_Chart.jpg

Gargantua

Death and Rebirth

On July 4, 1054 A.D, a bright new star appeared in the sky. Although it was 6,500 light-years away from Earth, it shone brighter than whole galaxies and was visible in daylight for 23 days. Little did the astronomers of the day know, the “new” star was actually the violent death of an old star: a supernova explosion. Stars more than ten times the mass of our sun will eventually become supernovas when they die. For their whole lives, they battle to balance energy trying to get out and gravity trying to crush them in under their own weight—but when they run out of fuel to burn, gravity wins. The star’s core collapses and its very atoms are crushed, emitting an enormous shockwave that flings heavy elements out into space. The remnants of this particular supernova formed the enigmatic Crab Nebula, an energetic cloud spanning five light-years, with each different colour representing different chemicals: orange is hydrogen, red is nitrogen, green is oxygen… And at the centre of the nebula lies the remnant of the exploded star. Gravity has squashed all the empty space out of it, leaving an incredibly dense object called a neutron star—just 20 km across, but with the mass of our sun, so on Earth, one teaspoonful would weigh one billion tons. Rotating neutron stars are known as pulsars, and this one spins at a rate of 30 times per second, sending out violent jets of particles at nearly the speed of light.

(Image Credit: 1, 2)

For more of the greatest collection of #Nebula in the Universe, visit http://nebulaimages.com/

The two high-speed jets of plasma move almost at the speed of light and stream out in opposite directions at right angles to the disc of matter surrounding the black hole, extending thousands of light-years into space. NASA