The Death of Stars: The Discovery of Neutrons
In The Death of Stars: The Discovery of Neutrons, narrator Kate Yule explores how stars reach the end of their lives and can no longer fight against their own gravity. Some stars expand, whereas giant stars contract to form black holes, invisible to telescopes. Learn how Jocelyn Bell Burnell built a new telescope which detected pulsars, which emit no visible light, but send out radio waves. This video is excerpted from BBC’s Einstein & Hawking: Masters of Our Universe, a mind-bending documentary that tells the story of how the two most famous scientists of the 20th Century transformed our understanding of the Universe and changed the world.
Lesson Express
Q: What happens when a medium-sized star runs out of fuel? What about a large star when it dies?
A: Medium-sized stars collapse into supernovas and then reduce to neutron stars. Large stars contract to a hole of infinite density or a black hole.
Q: At this point in time, why hadn’t anyone seen a black hole or neutron star?
A: They were so small and far away that they were invisible to telescopes.
Q: What did the Interplanetary Scintillation Array do? What did it help Jocelyn Bell Burnell discover?
A: It printed data that the scientists could analyze, showing pulses of radio signals from space. The pulsars were actually neutron stars that were formed from the collapse of dying suns.