Saturday, April 14, 2012

astro picture for the day


The smaller a given star starts out in life, the longer it can live.  With the universe only being 13.7 billion years old, we should potentially be able to find stars that have lived the entire age of the universe(well, there's qualifications like the 400,000 years after the big bang when the energy was so high, that photons couldn't stay bound up with a given atom; because of this, atoms couldn't clump together to form even molecules). 

Well, the picture above is of a white dwarf twelve billion years old; it is also only one hundred light years away!(astronomers have also found a neutron star only like 200 light years away).

With the coming nanotech era, people's lifespans could be drastically increased; some people may live to see space probes at least go to these places and bring back images of white dwarfs and neutron stars in a single lifetime!

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