I Couldn’t Help Myself On Such A Clear Night. I Revisited The Lagoon Nebula, Trifid Nebula, And M22

Remnant of supernova toward the constellation of Vela, which exploded 11,000 years ago. 

Image credit: NASA / Chandra x-ray Observatory

HBH 3, Strands of a Supernova 

Large Magellanic Cloud & Comet 252P/Linear

Earth and Luna from the ISS

What Happens When Planets, Stars, And Black Holes Collide?

“Brown dwarf collisions. Want to make a star, but you didn’t accumulate enough mass to get there when the gas cloud that created you first collapsed? There’s a second chance available to you! Brown dwarfs are like very massive gas giants, more than a dozen times as massive as Jupiter, that experience strong enough temperatures (about 1,000,000 K) and pressures at their centers to ignite deuterium fusion, but not hydrogen fusion. They produce their own light, they remain relatively cool, and they aren’t quite true stars. Ranging in mass from about 1% to 7.5% of the Sun’s mass, they are the failed stars of the Universe.

But if you have two in a binary system, or two in disparate systems that collide by chance, all of that can change in a flash.”

Nothing in the Universe exists in total isolation. Planets and stars all have a common origin inside of star clusters; galaxies clump and cluster together and are the homes for the smaller masses in the Universe. In an environment such as this, collisions between objects are all but inevitable. We think of space as being extremely sparse, but gravity is always attractive and the Universe sticks around for a long time. Eventually, collisions will occur between planets, stars, stellar remnants, and black holes.

What happens when they run into one another? Unbelievably, we not only know, we have the evidence to back it up!

This image shows what it might look like standing on the surface of a planet orbiting a brown dwarf star. An alien moon can also be seen in the sky. The brown dwarf gives off such feeble visible light it is difficult to see any of the landscape except for the reflection in the water.

credit: Jeff Bryant

Comet Lovejoy and The Pleiades

Western Veil