Star Dies and Explodes into Supernova

Another star died in an explosive death. According to CNN; “astronomers used a NASA X-ray satellite to spy on a star already well into its death throes, when another star in the same galaxy started to explode. The outburst was 100 billion times brighter than Earth’s sun.

The death of this star went through stages, with the core getting heavier in successive nuclear reactions and atomic particles being shed out toward the cosmos, Filippenko said. It started out in its normal life with hydrogen being converted to helium, which is what is happening in our sun.

The helium then converts to oxygen and carbon, and into heavier and heavier elements until it turns into iron.

That’s when the star core becomes so heavy it collapses in on itself, and the supernova starts with a shock wave of particles piercing through the shell of the star, which is what the Soderberg team captured on x-rays.”

Blog to Death?

A few weeks ago, Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41,survived a heart attack in December.

According to this article by New York Times, many bloggers are suffering from sleep disorders, exhaustion and other types of non-stop strain of producing blog entries.

To make you feel better, it also says “To be sure, there is no official diagnosis of death by blogging, and the premature demise of two people obviously does not qualify as an epidemic. There is also no certainty that the stress of the work contributed to their deaths. But friends and family of the deceased, and fellow information workers, say those deaths have them thinking about the dangers of their work style.”

So I guess we don’t have to worry, yet.