

Antimatter Triggers Largest Explosion Ever Recorded in Universe - mhb
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2010/04/antimatter-supernova-the-largest-explosion-ever-recorded-----------------weve-recently-seen-the-largest-explosion-ever-recor.html

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lutorm
These supernovae are counter-intuitive in the sense that normally people think
of anti-matter as "bring it into contact with normal matter and it will
explode". Here, it's the _production_ of anti-matter that robs pressure and
triggers the collapse. But the thing that always baffles me is how something
that is collapsing inward like that can explode without leaving a remnant. You
have to somehow get all the mass out of the potential well, and it's not easy
to take 10 solar masses of material falling inward at an appreciable fraction
of the speed of light and turn it around and shoot it out...

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jjs
Wouldn't the mass in the star's chewy nougat center* escape as energy at the
speed of light?

(* IANAP)

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jraines
_a super giant star two hundred times bigger than the sun utterly obliterated
by runaway thermonuclear reactions . . . unleashed a cloud of radioactive
material over fifty times the size of our own star_

Huh?

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strick
From the comments it seems that 'bigger' equals mass, and 'fifty times the
size' refers to volume. I was confused too.

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lutorm
That's probably true, but there's also the fact that the majority of the mass
of the star escapes as gamma rays and neutrinos, so mass isn't (locally)
conserved in these events.

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RandolphCarter
Any of u guys thinking what I'm thinking? This (way cool) process MIGHT be a
way to resurrect the Hoyle-Gold-Bondi steady state theory
(<http://www.aip.org/history/cosmology/ideas/bigbang.htm>) - if this guy was
200 times the mass of our sun, who is to say we don't all live in the
expanding after-math of just such a (albiet much larger) hyper-nova? Maybe the
big bang was something similar to this, and has happened an infinite number of
times before, and will again. Just a thought, but I never liked the concept of
finite time, for aesthetic reasons. If I'm wrong, please (seriously) let me
know how, since just naively it seems that the aftermath of this explosion, if
scaled up, is similar to the aftermath of the so-called big bang.

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pavel_lishin
This explosion didn't produce time or space.

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eru
And this explosion had a centre that you can find after the fact. The `centre'
of the big bang was everywhere.

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mkramlich
You'd think the largest explosion ever recorded in the universe would make the
front page of CNN.

