![]() Never fear, Planetary Society chief scientist, Bruce Betts, has much more to entertain us, including a new space trivia contest with a great prize. Then we'll hear how that star we race around is making it difficult to see our neighboring planets at the moment. We'll talk about it with the director of NASA's Heliophysics Division, Nicola Fox, and the mission's project scientist, Nour Raouafi. What it found there is dazzling in every sense of the word. On its eighth close encounter with our star, the spacecraft dipped within the sun's corona. The Parker Solar Probe, named for 94-year-old pioneering solar researcher, Eugene Parker, has gone where Parker probably never imagined a machine built by humans would ever go. I'm Mat Kaplan of The Planetary Society with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. We have touched the sun this week on Planetary Radio. Three deep space launches (Moon and beyond) happened in all of 2021: Lucy, DART and the JWST. How many deep space launches were there in all of 2021? (Launches, not spacecraft!) In the spectrum of the Sun’s light, who are the main solar absorption lines (basically, for visible light) named after? Be sure to include your name and mailing address. What is the sum of the number of hexagons of one Keck 10-meter telescope primary mirror divided by the number of JWST hexagons plus the Palomar Hale telescope primary mirror diameter divided by the Mount Wilson Hooker telescope diameter? Use standard mathematical order of operations.Ī beautiful Startorialist JWST black-on-gold necktie.Ĭomplete the contest entry form at or write to us at no later than Wednesday, January 19 at 8am Pacific Time. Subscribe to the monthly Planetary Radio newsletter. ![]() Parker Solar Probe preview: 10 hot facts about NASA's cool mission to the Sun.NASA, "Why the Sun Won't Become a Black Hole," Sept.NASA, "Our Sun - In Depth," last updated Oct.Gesicki, K., "The mysterious age invariance of the planetary nebula luminosity function bright cut-off," Nature Astronomy (2018).Watch a mini documentary on the topic, The Death of the Sun (opens in new tab), from PBS Space Time. Additional resourcesįind out what will happen to the Earth (opens in new tab) when the sun dies, from Live Science. Learn more about how stars form, evolve and die (opens in new tab) from NASA, and learn more about how the agency studies our sun (opens in new tab). To leave behind a black hole, a supernova must occur in a star with about 20 times the mass of the sun. An object of that size would form a dense stellar corpse called a neutron star after the explosion. In order to create a supernova, a star needs about 10 times the mass of our sun. ![]() Our sun isn't massive enough to trigger a stellar explosion, called a supernova, when it dies, and it will never become a black hole either. All the outer material will dissipate, leaving behind a planetary nebula. Once all the helium disappears, the forces of gravity will take over, and the sun will shrink into a white dwarf. That element will then fuse into heavier elements, like oxygen and carbon, in reactions that don't emit as much energy. Then, the hydrogen in that outer core will deplete, leaving an abundance of helium. That's when the sun will become a red giant, which it will remain for about a billion years. Our star will grow to be larger than we can imagine - so large that it will envelope the inner planets, including Earth. Gravitational forces will take over, compressing the core and allowing the rest of the sun to expand. With no hydrogen left to fuse in the core, a shell of fusion hydrogen will form around the helium-filled core, astrophysicist Jillian Scudder wrote in an article for The Conversation (opens in new tab). Once all the hydrogen gets used up, the sun will grow out of this stable phase. Our star is currently in the most stable phase of its life cycle and has been since the formation of our solar system, about 4.5 billion years ago. ![]() The battle between gravity and the energy from fusion reactions fuels our sun and billions of other stars in our galaxy and beyond.īut in about 5 billion years, the sun will run out of hydrogen. Those naked hydrogen atoms then fuse together into helium atoms, and that reaction releases enough energy to counter the intense pressure of gravity collapsing the cloud of gas.
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