You Never Forget Your First True Love...

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Massive stars end their lives with a bang: exploding as spectacular supernovas, they release huge amounts of mass and energy into space. These explosions sweep up any surrounding material, creating bubble remnants that expand into interstellar space. At the heart of bubbles like these are small, dense neutron stars or black holes, the remains of what once shone brightly as a star.

Credit: ESA/XMM-Newton/ L. Oskinova/M. Guerrero; CTIO/R. Gruendl/Y.H. Chu

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M44, the beehive Cluster in Cancer constellation

Credit: Alan Dyer

A protoplanetary disk is a rotating circumstellar disk of dense gas and dust surrounding a young newly formed star, a T Tauri star, or Herbig Ae/Be star. The protoplanetary disk may also be considered an accretion disk for the star itself, because gases or other material may be falling from the inner edge of the disk onto the surface of the star. This process should not be confused with the accretion process thought to build up the planets themselves. Externally illuminated photo-evaporating protoplanetary disks are called proplyds.

The nebular hypothesis of solar system formation describes how protoplanetary disks are thought to evolve into planetary systems. Electrostatic and gravitational interactions may cause the dust and ice grains in the disk to accrete into planetesimals. This process competes against the stellar wind, which drives the gas out of the system, and gravity (accretion), which pulls material into the central T Tauri star.

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Image credit: NASA/JPL, ESO

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Mark Basarab

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Saturn & Tethys - June 2 2007

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI/CICLOPS/Kevin M. Gill

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Halloween hike/drive

October 31st, 2018

Front Royal, VA

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Beautiful ginkgo trees at historic Sungkyunkwan University.