AaS! 123: What powers a hypernova?
Ask a Spaceman!
Paul M. Sutter
4.8 • 853 Ratings
🗓️ 3 March 2020
⏱️ 28 minutes
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Summary
How can a supernova become even more powerful? Why do we have such a hard time studying them, let alone defining them? What happens when you let a giant star unleash its full potential? I discuss these questions and more in today’s Ask a Spaceman!
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Music by Jason Grady and Nick Bain. Thanks to Cathy Rinella for editing.
Hosted by Paul M. Sutter, astrophysicist and the one and only Agent to the Stars (http://www.pmsutter.com).
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Now that we all have that nonsense, |
| 0:11.1 | egghead, string theory nerd business out of the way, |
| 0:16.0 | you know my favorite thing to do after I do a long series, |
| 0:20.0 | like I did on string theory, |
| 0:21.9 | is to blow something up. |
| 0:25.4 | I mean, it just releases all that energy we spend talking about arcane mathematics. |
| 0:30.6 | Now we could just, now we could just blow something up. |
| 0:32.8 | And the most favorite thing to blow up, of course, is stars. |
| 0:36.8 | Let's blow up some stars. |
| 0:38.4 | And let's, because it's special, let's try to find a way to blow up a star in the most |
| 0:43.7 | magnificent way possible. |
| 0:46.7 | I'm talking bigger than a nova. |
| 0:48.4 | Bigger than a kilonova, which is another episode, if you want to ask. |
| 0:52.1 | Bigger than a supernova. |
| 0:53.3 | I'm talking about a hypernova. |
| 0:57.5 | Yes, a hypernova. |
| 1:01.0 | We sorted out the definitions of Nova and Supernova about 100 years ago, but of course, Mother |
| 1:07.4 | Nature outwitted us because we thought we had taken the most extreme, |
| 1:11.7 | the most powerful explosions in the known universe, called those supernova, and we were done with |
| 1:16.5 | it, wiped our hands and moved on. |
| 1:18.3 | But of course, Mother Nature outwitted us. |
| 1:20.7 | And all it took was enough observations to reveal how much more powerful these explosions |
... |
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