Topic: death of a star?? (Read 880 times)

I can travel at over 186,000 nanometers per second! Remember to include your units.

But yes, people here seem to lack basic science knowledge. I wonder if it's a regional thing (a lot of people that lack a basic science education seem to be Indian).

haha, you said what i thought but didn't want to say out loud. i don't even understand what he's talking about... light not being fast enough to see? i.. don't know.

God people are stupid around here.  Light travels at 186,000 miles per second.  What does it matter if you are a block away or 25 light years?  The light still travels at that speed.  You are not seeing the event in "real time", just the time it took for light to travel to you.  In fact we can see star light from 13.5 billion years ago (estimated age of the universe)  And if you had read the thread, I posted a link showing that you can in fact see a star explode with your naked eyes.

http://www.space.com/22453-nova-delphinus-star-explosion-naked-eye.html

IMAO no way light can travel that fast to you to even see it with the naked eye like that buy I could be wrong.  I see  stars turn colors all the time from glares.  which star was it, you should be able to read it from the constellations

The process will take decades as far as I know too. take for example comets take years to even disappear.

Not all stars explode....they also fade away.

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/16302343/ns/technology_and_science-space/t/instead-bang-some-stars-fade-quietly/#.U4bd4ae9KSM

You sure you wasn't smoking some weird shit ?

Yeah, but they'd very slowly just fade from view, and wouldn't be like what op described at all. I'm almost certain he didn't see a dying star.

The death of a star is a sequence which can lasts thousands of years, you probably have seen something else...
Short scheme on how a star dies:

Different Stars Die Differently
Stars burn hydrogen, and when that hydrogen runs out, they die. When they die and how they die, however, differ depending on the size and type of the star. Hot, bright stars die sooner than large, cooler stars. Massive stars violently explode, while smaller stars slowly swell, then shrink to a dim spark. When stars die, they either become black holes (rare), white or black dwarfs (our sun will become a white dwarf), or something called a neutron star.

Death of Small Stars
Stars with the solar mass of about half our sun will either become something called a white dwarf or a red giant. These small stars do not collapse in upon themselves. Instead, they do one of two things: They either simply stop burning (in the case of very small stars) or the center of the star, which is usually still surrounded by some remnants of hydrogen, will fuse, causing the star to expand very slowly. These latter stars are actually called red giants, and they are more common than white dwarfs.
Scientists speculate that white dwarfs will eventually cool down enough to become something called a black dwarf, but they have not been able to prove this, since black dwarfs would necessarily actually have to be older than the universe currently is. This means that the universe hasn't been around long enough to let any white dwarfs form into black dwarfs!

Death of Big Stars
Very large stars (categories by solar masses above 8 ) will look much like a red giant, but the core of the star will be busy triggering nuclear fusion reactions, with the eventual result of the formation of iron, which collides with other gasses and causes a huge explosion. This explosion is called a Supernova. Supernovas are incredibly bright and very rare.The last one happening in our galaxy took place in the seventeenth century and was so bright it could be seen during daylight hours.
The gravity at the core of the star, and then supernova, will continue to pull the remains of the explosion towards itself, eventually forming something called a neutron star, which is incredibly dense (weighing trillions of tons).
Stars that have an even larger solar mass (30 or above) will continue to collapse after the supernova to the point where they form black holes, an exceedingly rare event. The gravitational pull of a black hole is so strong that no energy can escape it, not even light.

He wasn't watching the entire sequence of an exploding star.  Just the final seconds before the light extinguished.   

i don't know how long it takes for a star to explode.. but if it's only a few seconds, then it would still burn bright and then flicker off.

apparently supernovas take only a few seconds to flicker off.

Yes, but you don't see them blow up in a few seconds. The light takes millions of light years to reach us and lasts for a while so we don't see them just explode and instantly dissapear from view.

you know stars explode right? the heat really gets to a low point, but it's compacting and then it just blows. so it gets a lot brighter for a little bit before fading. what i was saying though, is that the star at low energy levels probably don't shoot out enough energy for us to see it and disappear..

Yeah, under the right circumstances, but that's not what he saw, and they obviously don't just burn up and are gone in a few seconds. A visible dead star would be seen so for weeks.

You can witness a star die "now" even though the event happened millions of years ago.  The light just now reached us and we were able to witness the event.  Scientist witnessed one just recently in January.

http://blogs.discovery.com/inscider/2014/01/a-star-just-exploded-next-door-and-its-a-huge-deal.html

And some are visible with your naked eye.  Here was one from last summer:

http://www.space.com/22453-nova-delphinus-star-explosion-naked-eye.html

No, he may have seen some space junk or a meteor burn up, but it probably wasn't even that. Sometimes your eyes just play tricks on you or you briefly see the reflection off things in the sky. Or maybe there was some weed in that cigarette he was smoking  .

Hehe yes so he saw the " movie " of the death of a star, just the light that remains traveling for thousands of years in the space.

Yep, you didn't just witness a star die. Most of the ones in the sky are already dead.

http://blogstronomy.blogspot.co.uk/2010/08/is-it-true-that-stars-we-see-are.html?m=1

it has to be big, much bigger than our sun.

but maybe the star OP saw got sucked in by a black hole or something. if it were a dying star, it probably wouldn't be bright enough for someone to see, since those stars are awfully far away, and a faint star's light probably wouldn't reach us.

another amazing thing: if that star did die, then you were basically staring hundreds or thousands (or millions) of years into the past. it happened way before you were born, but you were able to witness it.

I`m pretty sure it takes several hundred years? then it becomes a black hole right?