Lecture 8: Stellar remnants

Further reading

• There are a couple of articles and press releases about the discovery of the double pulsar, at the Australia Telescope site, http://www.atnf.csiro.au/news/newsletter/feb04/page1.html, and Jodrell Bank http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/news/doublepulsar/
• Cole Miller has a more technical, but still readable, page called "Introduction to Neutron Stars" http://www.astro.umd.edu/~miller/nstar.html
• There's an excellent site on general relativity at "Spacetime Wrinkles" at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Cyberia/NumRel/NumRelHome.html. It has excellent discussion of topics like gravitational waves and how to detect them, and illustrations of how light gets bent near a black hole.
• NASA has a nice booklet for teachers about black holes: "The Anatomy of Black Holes" http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/teachers/blackholes/imagine/contents.html
• The UCLA Galactic Centre Group page at http://www.galacticcenter.astro.ucla.edu/about.html has lots of interesting images and animations about their work measuring the mass of the black hole at the centre of our Galaxy.
• http://www.bigear.org/vol1no1/burnell.htm reproduces an article originally presented as an after-dinner speech at one of the Texas Symposia by Jocelyn Bell Burnell -- it's a very personal and entertaining account of the discovery of pulsars. She gave a paper about serendipitous discoveries, available at http://pos.sissa.it/cgi- bin/reader/conf.cgi?confid=99, including a description of several people who almost discovered pulsars before she did. She appeared on an episode of the BBC series "Beautiful Minds" http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00ry9jq -- the episode is not currently available, but watch it if you get the chance.
• The ATNF pulsar catalogue keeps an up-to-date list of every known pulsar at
http://www.atnf.csiro.au/people/pulsar/psrcat/

Sources for images used:

• Title supernova image: SN 1994D from Hubble, http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/opo9919i/
• Structure of the core just prior to the supernova explosion: from "Geochemistry" by William White, http://www.geo.cornell.edu/geology/classes/geo455/Chapters.HTML
• Artist's impression of neutron star: from http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/GLAST/science/neutron_stars.html
• Core bounce: from Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_II_supernova
• Animations of core collapse: from Adam Burrow's Movies, http://www.astro.princeton.edu/~burrows/
• Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities in the shock front: fron Stan Woosley, Astronomy 12: Stars and Stellar Evolution, Lecture 17 http://www.ucolick.org/~woosley/classnotes_winter2006.html
• 3D supernova model: from Blondin & Mezzacappa 2007, "Pulsars from an instability in the accretion shock of supernovae", Nature 445 58 http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2007Natur.445...58B
• X-ray images of Cas A: from Chandra Photo Album, http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2002/0237/0237_xray.jpg and http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2000/cas_a062700/index.html
• Sequence of events in a supernova: from Astronomy 201: Our Home in the Universe, http://astrosun2.astro.cornell.edu/academics/courses//astro201/sn.htm
• Supernova 1994D: by the High-z Supernova Search Team, from APOD 2000 March 12, http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap000312.html
• Supernova Types I and II light-curves: from AAVSO Variable Star of the Month, March 2001: Supernova 1987A, http://www.aavso.org/vstar/vsots/0301.shtml
• HST images of supernova remnants: from Hubblesite http://hubblesite.org/gallery/album/nebula_collection/pr2005037a/
• Expanding shell from SN1993J in M81: image courtesy of NRAO/AUI, from NRAO Image Gallery, http://www.nrao.edu/imagegallery/php/level3.php?id=392
• Cataclysmic binary picture: from Hubble Site News Center, May 22 1995, http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/releases/1995/23/
• Nucleosynthesis on the main sequence: from "Principes de Geochimie" by Michael Higgins, http://wwwdsa.uqac.uquebec.ca/~mhiggins/cours/6sct265/chapitre2.htm
• S-process nucleosynthesis: from Nautilus: Research http://exp-astro.physik.uni-frankfurt.de/nautilus/index.php?id=research&lang=en
• r-process sketch: from LLNL Research Highlight, July 2014, "Evidence of a turbulent beginning", https://str.llnl.gov/july-2014/borg
• Element abundances and nucleosynthesis sites:
• Nuclear power plant: from Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Nuclear_Power_Plant.jpg
• The deduction of the age of the SN which formed Earth's heavy elements is from "Gravity from the ground up" by Bernard Schutz (Cambridge UP, 2003), p. 126 (Investigation 11.3).
• Supernova image from March 1987: image by Marcelo Bass, CTIO/NOAO/AURA/NSF, http://www.noao.edu/image_gallery/html/im0644.html
• LMC/Tarantula Nebula: NOAO image, from Astronomy Picture of the Day 2000 Feb 22, http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap000222.html
• IMB event from SN 1987A: from "The IMB Experiment" by Jack Vander Velde, http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jcv/imb/imbp5.html
• The Tarantula Nebula and SN1987A: image by David Malin, from http://www.aao.gov.au/images/
• Light curve of SN1987A: from original paper by Bouchet et al. 1991, A&A 245 490; available online at http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1991A&A...245..490B
• Before and after images of SN 1987A: images by David Malin, http://www.aao.gov.au/images/
• Rings from SN 1987A: Hubble Site News Center, May 19 1994, http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/releases/1994/22/. Animation of the rings' orientation: from Hubble Site News Center, May 12 1997, http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/releases/1997/14/. Scenario for ring formation: from Hubble Site News Center, Feb 10, 1998, http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/releases/1998/08/. Lighting up of the ring: from Hubble Site News Center, Feb 19, 2004, http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/releases/2004/09/. December 2006 image, from Hubble Site News Center, Feb 22 2007 http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2007/10/
• Red Square nebula: from Peter Tuthill http://www.physics.usyd.edu.au/~gekko/redsquare.html
• Life cycle of SN 1987A: from http://www.astro.princeton.edu/~burrows/papers/rob/Stellar_Evolution.jpg
• SN 1006: imagined image by Tunc Tezel from APOD 2006 April 30 http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap060430.html; Chandra image from APOD 2005 December 26 http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap051226.html
• Number of supernova per year: plot by HMJ, using data from the IAU: Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/iau/lists/Supernovae.html
• SN2005gl: from Hubble news release STScI-2009-13, "Hubble Uncovers an Unusual Stellar Progenitor to a Supernova", http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/star/2009/13/
• SuperKamiokande: Super Kamiokande Photo Gallery http://www-sk.icrr.u-tokyo.ac.jp/sk/gallery/index-e.html
• ANTARES: from ANTARES site http://antares.in2p3.fr/
• IceCube from IceCube site http://icecube.wisc.edu/
• Black hole image: from NBC http://www.nbcnews.com/science/space/science-interstellar-look-beyond-wormhole-n241441

Last updated 8 December 2016