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Boom(title)

(Name)

Cambridge University(school)

January 1st, 1987

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Boom

On October 30th, 1961, on the uninhabited island of Novaya Zemlya, the world’s largest

man-made bomb was dropped and detonated. The Tsar Bomba, or King of Bombs, was created

by Soviet Russia in a show of strength, capability, and as a threat to the United States in the heat

of the Cold War. The explosion devastated the surrounding landscape with a power of fifty

megatons. The mushroom cloud it produced reached a peak of thirty-seven miles high, created a

flash of light seeable 620 miles away, leveled a small village some thirty-four miles away, and

supposedly, would have given anyone within a sixty-two-mile radius third-degree

burns(Tikkanen). Fifty megatons can be converted to roughly 2^17 joules worth of energy. But

there is a much larger, much more powerful explosion in the galaxy, with an average energy of

10^44 joules worth expenditure. The Tsar Bomba pales in comparison to the absolute might of

the Universe’s most powerful bomb, the supernova.

The supernova is, essentially, a bomb made out of a dying star. A supernova near enough

to touch earth with anything but a pretty light show would instantaneously end all life on Earth.

Earth would be swallowed up and evaporated into nothingness. How does a star go about dying

and exploding? In a simple fashion. A star is held together with extreme amounts of gravity,

whilst resisting collapse through stronger pressures. A star is composed of massive amounts of

matter, and as the matter comes closer together, the large amount of it generates enough gravity

to pull itself into a fiery, volatile concoction. The force of the gravity creates a core, in which

nuclear fusion takes place under the amazing heat and gravity, releasing more energy outwards,

creating pressure that pushes back on the gravity, expelling radiation, light, and heat. A star
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sustains itself for thousands, millions, and billions of years via the abundant amount of fuel it

contains in its layers and core. Once this storage of sorts is depleted and the sun starts to die,

however, is where the real fun begins.

The star, as it burns away the atoms in its core, begins to lose the fight against gravity and

collapses. The star’s core starts to shrink very slowly, and as such pulls more hydrogen from the

outer, superficial layers into the core to complete fusion reaction. Because of this pull on the

outer layers, and due to a principle known as the mirror principle, hydrogen also starts to expand

outwards. The star expands massively, and due to the much large space needed to heat the outer

layers, convection heating, the kind that occurs inside the earth, takes over from the previous

radiation heating. The star stops expanding, and is classified as a red giant star(Briggs, 2020).

The star heats up as it shifts fusion from element to element, constantly fusing heavier and

heavier elements. This created a layered, very hot and dense core. The element switching occurs

until the star reaches an element too heavy to fuse, iron. Iron is just heavy enough that fusion

using iron atoms requires too much energy and expels even less energy, and so drains the star of

energy. Once enough of the core has been turned into iron, gravity wins. The outwards push of

energy can no longer fight off the inwards pull of gravity, and the core collapses upon itself once

again.

From right here, what happens to the core hangs on how dense and large the core was. A

larger core will collapse into a black hole- an inescapable pit of virtually unending gravity-

whereas a smaller core would collapse into a neutron star- a tiny, ultra-dense star made up of

neutrons from combined electrons and protons. This collapse takes only a mere second, but the

effects are ginormous. The sudden collapse sends a massive shockwave rippling into itself,
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which then rebounds outwards. This rebound carries enough energy to disrupt the rest of the

star’s outer layers, exploding it across the universe as a supernova, a ball of light and fire of the

utmost magnitude. These expulsions of matter and energy can be seen as nebulae in our universe.

Supernovae expel almost as much energy in a few measly seconds than Sol has given out its

entire life, and much, much more light. They can be seen extremely easily as they often outshine

any of their neighbor stars.

The most recently detected supernova visible to the people on Earth was the Crab

Nebula, which exploded around July 4th, 1045 near the Taurus constellation according to Chinese

astronomers at the time. The 600 light year away supernova was visible for at least twenty-three

days, upwards to nearly two years at 653 days (Redd, 2012). Seven hundred years later the

astronomer John Bevis observed the far-off nebula. However, the French astronomer Charles

Messier recorded and published it twenty-seven years later, dubbing it Messier 1, more

commonly referred to as M1. But the Crab Nebula got its much more animalistic name from

William Parsons, who observed and sketched the nebula in 1844. Since then, astronomers have

been able to observe the nebula much, much more closely and have noticed that the Nebula was

expanding. Using this, they could turn back the clock and were able to confirm the early

sightings of the supernova. It has been determined that the Crab Nebula is moving outwards

faster than three-million miles per hour. The center of the Crab Nebula, the remnant of the star

that exploded, in a pulsar, or quickly rotating neutron star giving off radio waves. It was first

discovered in 1967, when an Air Force officer names Charles Schisler noticed an unexplainable

fluctuation on a radio radar while at the Clear Air Force Base in Alaska. Schisler noticed it over

a period of multiple days before it disappeared, and that the origin was that of the Crab Nebula,

but nothing came of it as the Air Force did not publish that it had found these phenomena until
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2007. Sometime later, Puerto Rican astronomers rediscovered the same pulsing on a radio radar

and were able to more conclusively and more publically determine that the radio waves did

indeed come from the Crab Nebula. In fact, it came from the very center, or the remnant of the

star that had died. The core had collapsed into a neutron star, more precisely a pulsar, which

spins extremely fast and emits radio waves.

Supernovae are some of the most interesting and scary happenings in our galaxy. From a

dying star the most powerful explosion erupts, possibly creating a crushing black hole and

spewing a beautiful tapestry for us to look at across the sky.

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References

Briggs, A. (2020, November 12). What is a supernova? Retrieved March 10, 2021, from

https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/definition-what-is-a-supernova

Redd, N. (2012, August 08). The crab Nebula (M1): Facts, discovery & images. Retrieved

March 10, 2021, from https://www.space.com/16989-crab-nebula-m1.html

Tsar bomba. (n.d.). Retrieved March 10, 2021, from https://www.britannica.com/topic/Tsar-

Bomba