In lieu of a proper post I thought I’d link to a recent video courtesy of SpaceLab at YouTube. In it you can watch a rather unshaven and scraggly version of me answering a simple but terrific question about the debt we owe to stellar nucleosynthesis. This issue also leads us to think about the [...]

Some recent research on the long-term future of the Milky Way prompted me to dig out and re-polish this post from the Life, Unbounded archives of 2010. Turns out it’s more relevant than ever… The galactic theme in the context of planets and life is an interesting one. Take our own particular circumstances. As unappealingly [...]

One of the most widely known and repeated astrophysical facts is that stars produce all the heavy elements that eventually make planets, shrubberies, and the likes of us. It’s absolutely true, but how exactly do they get those elements out into the universe to do all that? A major route is stellar explosion. When supernovae [...]

Two primitive meteorites collected in Antarctica appear to contain grains of silica—the stuff of quartz and sand—forged in an ancient supernova that predates the birth of the solar system. In fact, some researchers believe that it was just such a stellar explosion that triggered the formation of the solar system from a cloud of dust [...]

A luminous flash in the sky that appeared in 2007 seems to fit the bill for an unusual but long-predicted type of supernova, according to a new study. So-called pair-instability supernovae, in which stars more than 140 times the mass of the sun collapse and ignite a thermonuclear explosion, have been predicted by theory for [...]

Story 5 Hurricane Sandy hit New York City and surrounding areas hard this week, flooding streets and damaging homes. The full moon played a role in the severity of the flooding, due to a phenomena called syzygy. Links: Astronomy links full moon to Hurricane Sandy high tide Story 4 Astronomers have detected ancient starlight from [...]