EGMT 1520: Exploding Stars: How, Why, What’s Next

You may have heard of pasta, but what about antipasta, or spaghettification? Astronomers always face a quandary: how to talk about topics that are almost unimaginable. It is difficult to visualize leftovers of exploded stars the sizes of small cities that spin few hundreds of times a second, or black holes that spaghettify star guts. The universe is filled with these exotic, larger than life entities. How do scientists empirically determine the answers to these questions through evidence, and how was that evidence acquired? We will explore the foundations by which you will study how stars form, what influences their lives, what happens during their catastrophic ending, and finally the unimaginable properties of white dwarfs, neutron stars, and black holes. We will apply these foundations to face deep thought experiments: Where did the atoms that make up our bodies and everything around us come from? Do aliens exist?