The Final Frontier Space: Top Five Stellar Phenomena

1.      Black Holes

What else to kick off the list then the black hole. Black holes are absolutely one of my absolute favorite interstellar phenomena, because of how its concept seems so much like science fiction; a star that collapses in on itself that squishes into an object with infinite density and so much gravity that even light cannot escape at certain points. This border of ‘no return’ are called event horizons, after crossing this point even light cannot escape. Because light cannot escape finding black holes using conventional visible light methods. Instead there are a few methods; they can look for accretion disks which are disks of matter that accumulate around black holes while generating immense heat. Astronomers can also look at how nearby stars and objects move around any certain point due to the forces of gravity. The center of the Milky Way for example contains a super massive black hole, and we know this because astronomers observed stars revolving around an ‘empty’ space which is the super-massive black hole.

For those who need pictures to really believe black holes exist, here’s an X-Ray picture of the black hole Cygnus X-1.

Here’s an example of detection by accretion disk. (NGC 4261)

Black holes and other high mass object not only trap light from escaping, but they can also bend light forming these distorted images of faraway stars and galaxies also known as Einstein Rings. The process by which high masses (entire galaxies or black holes) bend light is also known as gravitational lensing.

2.       Super Nova

Next we move onto another ‘death’ of a star, but instead of impoding into a singularity with somewhat infinite mass we will watch as a star explodes in one of the greatest acts in the cycle of cosmic life. Supernovas are more powerful than a simple nova, which is the destruction of a white dwarf star.  Supernovas are massive stellar explosions that release enormous amounts of energy. These events contain so much energy they can often be expected to radiate more energy than our sun will radiate over its lifetime. The ‘death’ of a star marks the beginning of the new due to a process called “super nova nucleosynthesis”, which is a nuclear process to produce new heavier elements from lighter elements. Like a more powerful version of nuclear fusion which creates heavier elements from lighter elements.