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SPACE: The Crystal Sun

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In a process not unlike human aging, most stars entering the final chapter of their lives tend to shrink, shrivel and slowly turn white. Astronomers call these cold, dense husks of once-mighty stars white dwarfs and, unlike humans, their dotage can last for billions of years. In that time, stars with masses between about a tenth and eight times the mass of our sun burn up the last of their nuclear energy, shed their fiery outer layers and dwindle into ultracompact cores that pack about a sun’s-worth of mass into a planet-size package. While this might sound like an unglamorous … Read more

SPACE: Cosmic Zombies

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Cosmic Zombies - NASA

Close encounters with medium-size black holes can reanimate dead stars, if only momentarily, a new study suggests. A team of astronomers performed computer simulations to determine what happens when a burned-out stellar corpse known as a white dwarf passes close to an intermediate-mass black hole — one that harbors between 1,000 and 10,000 times the mass of Earth’s sun. The researchers determined that the black hole’s powerful gravity can stretch and distort the white dwarf’s previously inert innards so dramatically that nuclear-fusion processes can reignite for a few seconds, converting helium, carbon and oxygen into heavier elements such as iron. … Read more

SPACE: Are Aliens Rearranging Stars to Fight Dark Energy?

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nebula - pixabay

How to dominate the universe in three easy steps … Step 1: Harvest all of your planet’s resources. Step 2: Harvest all of your nearest star’s energy. Step 3: Harvest all the energy from all the stars in your local galaxy; then move on to another galaxy. Congratulations! Your species now has all the elbow room it needs to grow into a universal superpower. That’s one Russian astronomer’s perspective, anyway. Astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev first proposed these three phases (called Level I, II and III) of galactic expansion — which he referred to as the three “types” of technologically advanced civilizations … Read more