Podcaster: Richard Drumm
Title: Space Scoop: Who Turned Out The Lights?
Organization: Astrosphere New Media
Link : astrosphere.org ; http://unawe.org/kids/unawe1501/
Description: Space scoop, news for children.
Bio: Richard Drumm is President of the Charlottesville Astronomical Society and President of 3D – Drumm Digital Design, a video production company with clients such as Kodak, Xerox and GlaxoSmithKline Pharmaceuticals. He was an observer with the UVa Parallax Program at McCormick Observatory in 1981 & 1982. He has found that his greatest passion in life is public outreach astronomy and he pursues it at every opportunity.
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Transcript:
This is 365 Days of Astronomy. Today we bring you a new episode in our Space Scoop series. This show is produced in collaboration with Universe Awareness, a program that strives to inspire every child with our wonderful cosmos.
Today’s story is…
Who Turned Out The Lights?
Looking at this episode’s album artwork you could say that it looks like someone has stolen the stars right out of the sky! But don’t worry, we don’t need Sherlock Holmes to solve this mystery— this cosmic crime has already been solved.
The black gap in this glittering starfield isn’t really a gap at all. It is a dark cloud of gas and dust blocking the light of the background stars. It’s called LDN 483, for Lynds Dark Nebula 483, and it’s located about 700 light years away in the direction of the constellation Serpens.
The Lynds Dark Nebula Catalog was compiled by the American astronomer Beverly Turner Lynds and was published in 1962. These dark nebulae were found from a visual inspection of the Palomar Sky Survey photographic plates.
The Wide Field Imager, an instrument mounted on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile, captured this image of LDN 483 and its surroundings.
Clouds like this are called Dark Nebulae. They appear to be empty, starless patches of sky, but in reality these clouds are some of the busiest star-making machines in the entire Universe!
It’s out of the gas and dust in these Dark Nebulae that stars are made. And many of these apparently dark blobs are brimming with hidden new-born stars — including this one.
In the earliest part of its life a star is called a ‘protostar’. At this point, the star is simply a ball of cold gas and dust that is collapsing under the force of gravity, it doesn’t even have the nuclear fire in its heart, which powers older stars.
As it continues to collapse, the protostar squeezes into a tighter, hotter ball. Protostar surface temperatures go from a freezing -250°C to up to 40,000°C when they become fully fledged stars, a process that takes thousands of years. Which is fast in astronomical terms.
As the cloud in this picture creates more and more stars, it will be eaten away and disperse to reveal the missing background stars and the ones that are newly born too.
Hey, here’s a Cool Fact:
The start of a star’s life, the initial collapse of the cloud of gas can be triggered by many events, such as galaxies colliding or the shockwave of a nearby supernova or just plain old gravity!
Thank you for listening to 365 Days of Astronomy!
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
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