Podcaster: Richard Drumm
Title: Space Scoop: Super Star Takes on Black Holes in a Jet Contest
Organization: 365 Days Of Astronomy
Link : astrosphere.org ; http://unawe.org/kids/unawe1537/
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: Super Star Takes on Black Holes in a Jet Contest
For dozens of years, black holes have been the undisputed champions at forming powerful jets. In comparison, other objects make puny jets that are rarely bright enough for us to see. But now astronomers have discovered a star that wants to challenge the title.
The challenger is a type of super-compact star called a neutron star. The star is half of a double star system along with a companion star and was recently seen blasting out incredible amounts of material into space.
When neutron stars have a nearby companion star, they often steal gas from their friend. When this happens some of that gas is blasted out into space at incredible speeds, creating a spectacular display.
The more material the star steals from its companion, the brighter the jet becomes. But when a team of Dutch and Australian radio astronomers looked at the neutron star making these brilliant new jets, they saw that it was only stealing a tiny trickle of material. So tiny that it’s not normally enough material to cause such impressive jets.
It turns out that the neutron star behind these jets is quite unusual. It can spend years at a time sitting quietly in space, collecting gas, before suddenly flaring up. While the jets may be short-lived they are definitely spectacular!
Hey, Here’s A Cool Fact:
Neutron stars are really, really awesome stars.
Thank you for listening to 3 hundr… What? You want to know why they’re so awesome?
Well OK, but neutron stars deserve an entire show to themselves, so here’s a little tidbit.
The atoms that make up our bodies are mostly empty space. Take the hydrogen atom as an example. Nice & simple. One proton in the center and a single electron orbiting around it in a probabilistic cloud, like a planet that has no fixed orbital inclination.
The percent of the area inside this globe of cumulative electron locations that is occupied by matter is 0.000 000 000 000 4%.
Let’s make that more understandable. If that spherical zone that the electron occupies is scaled up to the size of the Earth, then the proton in the nucleus would be 200 meters or 600 feet in diameter. About the size of a football stadium. No wonder, then, that neutrinos can pass right through us without hitting anything!
That nucleus is where almost all the mass of the atom is located. Now imagine a ball of matter that dense that’s 24 km or 14 miles in diameter, weighing about twice what the Sun weighs.
One teaspoon of this material would weigh about 900 times as much as the Pyramid of Khufu in Giza.
If you were 1 meter away from a neutron star and you fell to the surface from there, when you hit the star you would be traveling at 7.2 million kilometers per hour.
I did say they were awesome, didn’t I?
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
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