![]() ![]() On Halloween, 2021, the astronomers obtained 40,000 such short exposures using several different filters to select out certain star colors. That’s what Zorro can do, taking images a mere 60 milliseconds long. One way around that is to take extremely short exposures, freezing out that motion. Two or more stars close together in the sky can be blended into a single blob. Over time, even a fraction of a second, the image can move around so much it gets blurred into a circle called, weirdly, the seeing disk. Each one of these acts like a lens, bending the incoming light form stars. It’s constantly in motion, with little packets of air zipping back and forth. The Earth’s atmosphere is a pain for astronomers. What makes it special is that it can do speckle imaging. To do better, a team of astronomers used the 8.1-meter Gemini South telescope in Chile with a special camera on it called Zorro. We literally owe our existence to massive stars going supernova. Those elements are necessary to make planets, and life. They can become unstable, pulsating and even undergoing explosions that are just this side of a catastrophic supernova.Īlso, when massive stars explode they seed the galaxy around them with heavy elements like iron that they make during their lifetime. We have a decent grasp of how stars like the Sun behave, but as you add more mass to them their behavior can get wonky. Galaxi es plural.īut how massive can stars get? It’s an important question in astronomy. They can light up entire nebulae, and when they explode at the ends of their short, violent lives they can outshine entire galaxies. The energy they produce scales steeply with mass, so at the top end of this range stars can blast out so much light they can be seen in other galaxies with small telescopes, and would cook any planets they have to a crisp. Massive stars - I mean truly massive, with 20 or more times the Sun’s mass - are terrifyingly powerful. ![]()
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