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Watch QuickTime video:
Supernova explosion |
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When a star runs out of the nuclear fuel that keeps it shining,
it collapses under its own weight. As it shrinks down, the
space and time around it gets more and more distorted. In the late
1930s, J. Robert Oppenheimer and Hartland Snyder discovered that,
if the star was massive enough, nothing could halt the collapse.
The star would shrink down and down and literally cut itself off
from the rest of the universe within a black hole.
At the same time
that the deep core of the star is imploding, the outer layers
of the star are being blown into space in an explosion called a
supernova. This movie depicts the final moments before the supernova
explosion, where the creation of the black hole releases a burst
of energy that pierces through the star and creates a flash of
gamma rays that can be seen across the observable universe. |
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