Stellar Obituaries
RASC Regular Meeting, Monday March 8, 2021
7:00 PM, Meet and Greet
7:30 PM, Meeting begins, including guest talk, “What’s Up?”, AstroImaging Corner, and other RASC news.
FREE and open to the public.
Meeting will be hosted on Zoom using this link (TBA).
Guest Speaker:
Dr. Sharon Morsink
Stellar Obituaries
Cas A Supernova Remnant. Imaged by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.
Stars have long lifespans that range from millions of years to hundreds of billions of years. But eventually all stars run out of fuel and die. When stars die, they can leave behind a white dwarf star, a neutron star, a black hole, or nothing but a bit of hot gas!
There have been a lot of discoveries in the field of stellar death in the last couple of years. In this talk I’ll introduce the main ideas behind white dwarf stars, neutron stars, black holes, and supernovae. Some of the recent observations of black holes and neutron stars include the first image of “the black hole’s shadow”, the measurements of colliding black holes and neutron stars, and observations of X-rays from binary systems containing a stellar corpse. I will provide a report on the most interesting stellar obituaries from the last couple of years, and explain what they tell us about how stars die, and how they change when they begin their new life as a black hole or neutron star.
