Kip Thorne – Biography

                Kip Stephen Thorn, a renowned American theoretical physicist was born in Logan, Utah in 1940. From his early life, he had exposure to the magnificent world of science which later on, he himself would be an influence in. He obtained his higher education at both Caltech and Princeton University for his BS and PhD, respectively. After doing so, he dedicated his time completing research and becoming a professor at Caltech. His subject area is theoretical physics. As professor since 1970, Thorne has advised and served as a mentor for over 50 physicists who have received their PhD under Thorne. Thorne’s research alone and with his students is focused around gravitation physics and astrophysics, especially with concentration on relativistic stars, black holes, and gravitational waves. With his own work alongside the work of students like Carlton Caves, Anna Zytkow, and James Hartle, Thorne has posed some important questions and research in recent times. This includes: Is there a dark side of the universe populated by objects as black holes?, Can we observe the birth of the universe?, and will 21^st century technology reveal quantum behavior in the realm of human-size objects?

                With those questions in mind, Thorne has dedicated his research to physics and has contributed to the science community with his extensive work with general relativity. However, he is best known to the general public for his theory that wormholes can be used for time travel. He was one of the first people to conduct scientific research on whether space and time can be multiplied and connected, thus can time travel be possible through wormholes. Thorne’s research on this indicated that simple masses passing through traversable wormholes could never engender paradoxes. Some of Thorne’s other research dealt with tools for visualizing space-time curvature, in relation to black holes causing so. Thorne’s work with black holes extends to his Hoop Conjecture which describes that an imploding star turns into a black hole when the circumference of the designed hoops can be placed around the star and set into rotation.

                Thorne has won many honoring awards for his achievements and contributions to the science community such as awards by the country’s most prestigious universities, the Lilenfeld Prize, the Albert Einstein Medal, th e UNESCO gold medal, and on NASA’s science board. He currently is not retired from research nor from the science community but now dedicates his time in possibly producing science fiction movies with famous figures like Stephen Spielberg. He hopes to develop and possibly direct his own released film in the near future. Thorne also enjoys writing in his spare time.

APOD 4.7

The APOD I chose for this week depicts both the Milky Way Galaxy and cosmic dust from the Comet Halley. The image depicts the annual meteor shower known as Eta Aquarids, that is why both the milky way and the comet is depicted. During this shower, meteors move incredibly quick and enter the atmosphere at about 66 km/second. I chose this APOD because it included the Milky Way in its title and we had just learned about it in class. However, I also learned about the annual meteor shower and look forward to the next one I can gaze at. 

APOD 4.6

The APOD for the date of May 1st is titled, "Brisbane Sunset Moonset". The majestic photograph was taken in the southeastern corner of Australia: Brisbane. The photograph shows the beautiful relationship as the sun and new moon set together on April 29, creating a sort of  partial solar eclipse. These rarities of nature have been posted on the APOD's archive before like this one from April 30th:

In order to capture such event, the image was taken from a stack of images taken 5 minutes apart in length with telephoto lens and a solar filter. The reason I chose this image was because after reading the description, I began  thinking of the time and effort put into producing these images. I have mild experience with the images I process from the micro-observatory satellite images and it gives me a good insight into how one can produce such wonderful photographs taken from nature.

APOD 4.5

This week's APOD shows Messier 5, a globular star cluster located between the constellations Libra and Serpens. This globular cluster was thought to be a nebula, discovered by 18th century astronomer Charles Messier. It contained more than 100K stars, bound together around a 165 light-years in diameter length. According to this APOD, M5 is one of the oldest globulars in the milky way. I chose this photo for this week's APOD because we have studied the constellations Libra and Serpens so I found it interesting to learn about a new M object located between both. I also found it incredibly interesting that  in the 18th century, so long ago, Messier was able to observe this cluster with the naked eye or telescope. 

APOD 4.4

The APOD that I chose for this week depicts the recent lunar eclipse seen over from the chilly Waterton Lake in Waterton Lakes National Park in Albert, Canada. Recently, we have been working with a lot of astronomy photography and it is something I have grown to understand and become interested in more. In this photo of the lunar eclipse, there is an exposure of 10 minutes which allowed for the capture of the moon's eclipse phase's position over a period of 80 minutes.The photograph also depicted the star Spica from the constellation Virgo. Something interesting that I learned from this entry was that as early as 270 BC, a greek astronomer by the name of Aristarchus measured the duration of a lunar eclipse. I find it awesome that someone in such an early civilization could do that without the aid of modern clocks and cameras but rather algebraic math.

Contributions to N + S of Milky Way

Galileo: Galileo observed the Milky Way, which was previously believed too be nebulous, He found it to be a magnitude of stars packed extremely dense instead of what people thought to be simply nebulas.

William Herschel: Helped establish the shape of the milky way with the large telescopes. He helped establish that we in fact live in the milky way and that the fuzzy patches observed were nebulae. By measuring the stars, he helped establish that we live in what he called a disk of stars. 

Harlow Shapley: Helped expand our knowledge on the shape of the milky way. He began by studying globular clusters around the time when the shape of the galaxy was unknown. But after his research was published, the shape and the position of our solar system in the galaxy was known. 

Edwin Hubble: He helped understand that the cloudy patches observed were not nebulae but other nearby galaxies. This helped understand the size of the universe. He also helped by stating that the universe was in fact expanding.

Immanuel Kant:  Believed the milky way was disk shape but never achieved much work on it.

Henrietta Leavitt: Discovered the period luminosity relation.

The Great Debate: Between Curtis and Shapley, Shapley held the position that the spiral nebula we call galaxies were inside the milky way. Curtis argued they were outside.

The end of a high mass star: Pulsars and Neutron Stars

Like we have learned in class, many of the stars found in the universe have similar properties to our own star, the sun. However, some stars are different and like we learned in the star formation unit and these stars are of high mass. These special stars are destined to end in supernovas. Compared to our sun they are 10x heavier and 4x as large. Due to this high mass, their fuel is burned at a greater rate, in about 10 million years. One can put into perspective this with our own sun whose hydrogen will  burnt out after 10 billion years, the difference is clear. When this happens to our stars like our sun, they become a white dwarf: small, dense, and whose temperature cools down eventually. These high mass stars on the other hand no longer support the outward pressure that balances with their inward gravitational pull its immense mass requires. Compared to the slow and calm death of the other stars, the death of this high mass stars becomes much more dramatic. The core shrinks, burns up in temperatures to about 100 billion degrees and becomes more dense with the iron atoms crushing together. This dramatic explosion of energy lead to a shocking wave that expands to about 1 billion kph. This is the death of the high mass star, this is a supernova.  The material pushed away by the explosion forms into a ring shape known as the supernova remnant. What remains from the original high mass star in a much smaller dense core of only neutrons, known as a neutron star. If the neutrons radiate, a pulsar forms. However, something else could happen. If the original high mass star was greater than 15x the sun, the neutrons would not survive the collapse of the core and the stars would become black holes.

The following diagram, visually demonstrated the life cycle of a high mass star: