• Question: have u ever seen two stars explode live?

    Asked by MEH to Mark on 9 Nov 2016.
    • Photo: Mark Kennedy

      Mark Kennedy answered on 9 Nov 2016:

      Unfortunately not! And if I did, the objects I work on are so far away from Earth that it wouldn’t look very impressive 🙁 all I’d see is a tiny pixel of light get a bit brighter.

      I imagine it would be amazing to see though, and hopefully some day in the future we’ll have telescopes powerful enough to see them, or we’ll even be able to go see them in person.

      For the moment, this picture that was taken after a star had exploded will have to do:

      All those colours are gas and bits of the star that were left over, and in the centre, there’s a really fast spinning object called a pulsar (https://www.nasa.gov/subject/8731/pulsars/)

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