Defending the 12th century since the 14th; blogging since the 21st.

Catholicism, Conservatism, the Middle Ages, Opera, and Historical and Literary Objets d'Art blogged by a suburban dad who teaches law and writes stuff.


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Who was Cacciaguida? See Dante's PARADISO, Cantos XV, XVI, & XVII.


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A star done blowed up. Britain's leftist Guardian, unable to blame it on the Bush-Blair alliance, reports:

The enormous star explosion released about 100 times more energy than a typical supernova and at its peak was 100,000 million times brighter than the sun.

Is it too late to name it Hermione?

[S]uper-massive stars had a live fast, die young existence in astronomical terms.

Leave it to the Brits to describe astronomical phenomena in terms of clubbers.

Usually, supernovas occur when stars exhaust their fuel and collapse.

Supernova? I once had a Chevy Nova that did that....

Its massive core may have produced so much gamma radiation that some of the energy was converted into particle and anti-particle pairs.

Ah. The kind you don't want to seat next to one another at parties.

This produced a huge gravitational pull that tugged the star in on itself. The collapse triggered runaway thermonuclear reactions which caused the explosion to spew star detritus into space.

Yo, Iran, watch this....!

Of course, given the distance, all this happened 240 million years ago, and we're just seeing it now. Sort of like me and the second season of Lost. But there is a nova going into business much closer:

[C]loser to home in the Milky Way lies a star called Eta Carinae, some 7,500 light years away. It has been losing mass rapidly

What, did it have a liturgical reform?

and looks as though it may develop into a supernova. It is hard to predict what it would look like to us, but some suggest it would be so bright that it would be visible alongside the sun in the day.

And everyone's Blackberry will konk out....
posted by Cacciaguida at 10:00 PM