Hypernova Essays - Stellar Evolution, Space Observatories

Hypernova Mysterious Blast, Hypernova Gamma-ray bursts (GRB) have left astronomers scratching their heads since the late 1960s when they were discovered by U.S. military satellites. Part of the mystery began to unlock when astronomers at Northwestern University detected the first observational evidence for the remnants of hypernovae, explosions hundreds of times more powerful than supernovae, last year. Hypernovae may be the possible source of GRBs, making them the most energetic events known in the Universe besides the Big Bang. Northwestern astronomer Daniel Wang identified two hypernova remnants in galaxy M101, also known as the Pinwheel galaxy some 25 million light years away, in April 1999. The remnants were previously thought to be supernovae remnants, but Wang detected strong X-ray emission from them which led him to believe it was an explosion much more powerful than a supernova. One nebula, MF83, has a radius of over 430 light years and is one of the largest remnants known. The other nebula, NGC5471B, is expanding very fast at a velocity of 100 miles per second. The X-ray light from these nebulae is brighter than the brightest supernova remnants known. After Wang calculated the energy needed to produce these remnants, he concluded they were most likely a result from a hypernova. ?These are two of the most unusual remnants known,? Wang said. ?We see that they are bright in X-ray even at a distance of 25 million light years away. They must be from spectacular explosions.? Bohdan Paczynski, of Princeton University, first introduced the concept of a hypernova in 1998 as a why to explain GRBs. Gamma-ray bursts are brief but intense blasts of high-energy radiation. They only last for about 3 seconds, but in that brief time they can release enough energy to be more luminous than the rest of the universe. Paczynski theorized that a hypernova is most likely related to the formation of black holes. The collapse of a massive star and/or its merger with a neutron star could generate more energy than an average star explosion. This is a very possible theory because they have found evidence that GRBs appear close to massive star-forming regions. The Burst and Transient Source Experiment (BATSE) instrument aboard NASA's Compton Gamma Ray Observatory satellite has recorded more than 2,000 bursts, about one a day, since its launch in 1991. It also plotted their positions all around the sky and found that GRBs don't concentrate in the plane of the Milky Way, where most of the Milky Way stars are located. Until then, astronomers didn't know if the GRBs are coming from objects on the outskirts of our galaxy or from distant galaxies. These findings pointed to an origin from distant galaxies. In 1997, the Italian-Dutch BeppoSAX satellite pinpointed bursts with enough accuracy to allow optical and radio telescopes to view the burst's sources for the first time. On April 25, 1998, The galaxy ESO 184-G82 was host to a combined GRB and supernova explosion. Using Hubble's Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph, astronomers obtained the first detailed images of a galaxy in which a GRB occurred. This burst, GRB 980425, is the closest ever detected at 125 million light years away and thus must have been 1000 to 1,000,000 times fainter than normal bursts. Also, an unusually bright supernova, SN 1998bw, was seen in exactly the same location merely a day after the burst. Several groups of astronomers have followed the development of this event closely over the last two years. On June 12, 2000, a group of European astronomers obtained very detailed observations of the galaxy ESO 184-G82, the first time such a galaxy has been observed in such fine detail. The new observations allow astronomers to investigate the GRB phenomenon in much greater detail. Most astronomers today believe that GRB 980425 and SN 1998bw (less than 24 hours apart) did come from the same source and has made connection between the two most energetic events in the Universe highly possible. Astronomers, with these new discoveries, are coming closer to unlocking the mystery of the GRB phenomenon. They still know very little about the true nature of GRBs and hypernovae. ?I suspect GRBs may well be just a tip of an iceberg, as we have no clue why some explosions generate so

Examples of Images in Poetry, Fiction, and Nonfiction

Examples of Images in Poetry, Fiction, and Nonfiction An image is a representation in words of a sensory experience or of a person, place, or object that can be known by one or more of the senses.   In his book The Verbal Icon (1954), critic W.K. Wimsatt, Jr., observes that the verbal image which most fully realizes its verbal capacities is that which is not merely a bright picture (in the usual modern meaning of the term image) but also an interpretation of reality in its metaphoric and symbolic dimensions. Examples Far beyond her, a door standing ajar gave on what appeared to be a moonlit gallery but was really an abandoned, half-demolished, vast reception room with a broken outer wall, zigzag fissures in the floor, and a vast ghost of a gaping grand piano emitting, as if all by itself, spooky glissando twangs in the middle of the night.(Vladimir Nabokov, Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, 1969)In the shallows, the dark, water-soaked sticks and twigs, smooth and old, were undulating in clusters on the bottom against the clean ribbed sand, and the track of the mussel was plain. A school of minnows swam by, each minnow with its small individual shadow, doubling the attendance, so clear and sharp in the sunlight.(E.B. White, Once More to the Lake. One Mans Meat, 1942)Mr. Jaffe, the salesman from McKesson Robbins, arrives, trailing two mists: winter steaminess and the animal fog of his cigar, which melts into the coffee smell, the tarpaper smell, the eerie honeyed tangled drugstore smell.(Cynthia Ozick, A Drugstore in Winter. Art Ardor, 1983) That woman sitting on the stoop of an old brownstone house, her fat white knees spread apart- the man pushing the white brocade of his stomach out of a cab in front of a great hotel- the little man sipping root beer at a drugstore counter- the woman leaning over a stained mattress on the sill of a tenement window- the taxi driver parked on a corner- the lady with orchids, drunk at the table of a sidewalk cafe- the toothless woman selling chewing gum- the man in shirt sleeves, leaning against the door of a poolroom- they are my masters.(Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead. Bobbs Merrill, 1943)I should have been a pair of ragged clawsScuttling across the floors of silent seas.(T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, 1917)The train moved away so slowly butterflies blew in and out of the windows. (Truman Capote, A Ride Through Spain. The Dogs Bark. Random House, 1973)It is time for the babys birthday party: a white cake, strawberry-marshmallow ice cream, a bottle of champagne saved from another party. In the evening, after she has gone to sleep, I kneel beside the crib and touch her face, where it is pressed against the slats, with mine.(Joan Didion, Going Home. Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968 He clasps the crag with crooked hands;Close to the sun in lonely lands.Ringed with the azure world, he stands.The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;He watches from his mountain walls,And like a thunderbolt he falls.(Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The EagleAmong the strangest illusions which have passed like a haze before my eyes, the strangest one of all is the following: a shaggy mug of a lion looms before me, as the howling hour strikes. I see before me yellow mouths of sand, from which a rough woolen coat is calmly looking at me. And then I see a face, and a shout is heard: Lion is coming.(Andrei Bely, The LionThe apparition of these faces in the crowd;Petals on a wet, black bough.(Ezra Pound, In a Station of the Metro)[Eva] rolled up to the window and it was then she saw Hannah burning. The flames from the yard fire were licking the blue cotton dress, making her dance. Eva knew there was time for nothing in this world other than the time it took to get there and cover her daughters body wi th her own. She lifted her heavy frame up on her good leg, and with fists and arms smashed the windowpane. Using her stump as a support on the window sill, her good leg as a lever, she threw herself out of the window. Cut and bleeding she clawed the air trying to aim her body toward the flaming, dancing figure. She missed and came crashing down some twelve feet from Hannahs smoke. Stunned but still conscious, Eva dragged herself toward her firstborn, but Hannah, her senses lost, went flying out of the yard gesturing and bobbing like a sprung jack-in-the- box.(Toni Morrison, Sula. Knopf, 1973 [In] summer the granite curbs starred with mica and the row houses differentiated by speckled bastard sidings and the hopeful small porches with their jigsaw brackets and gray milk-bottle boxes and the sooty ginkgo trees and the banking curbside cars wince beneath a brilliance like a frozen explosion.(John Updike, Rabbit Redux, 1971) Observations Images are not arguments, rarely even lead to proof, but the mind craves them, and, of late more than ever.(Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, 1907)In general, emotional words, to be effective, must not be solely emotional. What expresses or stimulates emotions directly, without the intervention of an image or concept, expresses or stimulates it feebly.(C.S. Lewis, Studies in Words, 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press, 1967) Images in Nonfiction ​Instinctively, we go to our store of private images and associations for our authority to speak of these weighty issues. We find, in our details and broken and obscured images, the language of symbol. Here memory impulsively reaches out its arms and embraces imagination. That is the resort to invention. It isnt a lie, but an act of necessity, as the innate urge to locate personal truth always is. (Patricia Hampl, Memory and Imagination. I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory. W.W. Norton, 1999)In creative nonfiction you almost always have the choice of writing the summary (narrative) form, the dramatic (scenic) form, or some combination of the two. Because the dramatic method of writing provides the reader with a closer imitation of life than summary ever could, creative nonfiction writers frequently choose to write scenically. The writer wants vivid images to transfer into the mind of the reader after all, the strength of scenic writing lies in its ability to evoke sensual images. A scene is not some anonymous narrators report about what happened some time in the past; instead, it gives the feeling that the action is unfolding before the reader. (Theodore A. Rees Cheney, Writing Creative Nonfiction: Fiction Techniques for Crafting Great Nonfiction. Ten Speed Press, 2001)