Word: sun
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...shock waves from an ancient supernova sparked the creation of the sun and planets, Anders concludes, "it's very likely that the material from which our solar system was formed was contaminated with these diamonds. The diamonds on earth may well be a mixture of those loaded with xenon and those without...
...long it takes for a pulsar to develop is one puzzle 1987A may help answer. In addition, says Taylor, scientists would like to learn what kind of supernovas make pulsars. "We have a good idea that stars between eight and 15 times the mass of the sun are in the right range," he says, "but that is still somewhat speculative...
...Large Magellanic Cloud. NASA promptly ordered some of its satellites to do the same. On its way to a rendezvous with Neptune in 1989, the Voyager 2 spacecraft pointed its two ultraviolet-light detectors at the supernova. The Solar Max satellite turned its attention from its primary target, the sun, to measure the gamma rays emanating from 1987A. The International Ultraviolet Explorer began measuring the supernova's ultraviolet radiation. In Japan space officials hurried a newly launched satellite through its calibration tests so that it could begin detecting X rays emitted by 1987A's hot gases...
...more detailed and valuable had they been made with a telescope. Unfortunately, the star's timing was off. The supernova lighted the night skies just a scant five years before Galileo made the first documented telescopic scan of the heavens, discovering mountains on the moon and spots on the sun...
...nuclear fuel is exhausted and the fusion reactions stop, however, gravity takes over. Without the outward pressure needed to keep it "inflated," the core of the star begins to collapse like a deflating balloon, its matter crushing down toward the center. For a star about the size of the sun, the collapse stops after several intermediate steps when the stellar material is compressed so much that its atoms virtually touch, forming what physicists call degenerate matter; what prevents further collapse is the tendency of the atoms' negatively charged electrons to repel one another. The star has become a white dwarf...