StarStuff

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About Me

Hi, I'm Stuart Gary, I'm a journalist and broadcaster with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. I love science, especially the majesty and wonder of space, so I put together a weekly astronomy show for the ABC called StarStuff.

In my spare time I like to fly planes, practice karate and pistol target shooting and play around with my cars, a twin Turbocharged Falcon GT Interceptor and a DeTomaso Pantera GTS.

I’m vegan, a life member of the RSPCA and a supporter of several animal welfare organisations.

My other great passion is music which is understandable when you realise that I was a radio music jock long before I became a journalist. My record library contains tens of thousands of singles, albums, videos, CD’s and DVDs. These days that’s all stored in an 8 terabyte raid enclosure linked to a desk top PC at home. My tastes range from rock and grunge through to trance and new romantics. At the moment I’m listening to heaps of MGMT, William Control, Hawthorne Heights and Short Shack, but I have lots of time for the classics like Placebo and the early stuff from Silverchair, In fact Neon Ballroom is still my favourite album, and Emotion Sickness is still one of my two favourite songs (the other being William Control’s Death Club).

StarStuff is a great name for the show, but it works on more levels than just astronomy, it’s really cool for any science program because everything in the universe after the quark gluon plasma of the big bang is star stuff even the iron which makes your blood red was manufactured in the supernova explosions of stars. Carl Sagan said it best, we are all star stuff.


This blog is designed to allow me to publish all the things which can’t fit into StarStuff. There’s heaps of really interesting stuff out there and only a half hour window for the show, so each week becomes a battle to try and squeeze it all in. This blog lets me do that.

You can check out the show at the offical ABC StarStuff website:
http://www.abc.net.au/science/starstuff/

There's also an official ABC StarStuff Twitter feed: @abcstarstuff

And an official ABC Science website: http://www.abc.net.au/science/


The legal stuff: This is my personal blog. The views expressed in this blog are those of me only and not the Australian Broadcasting Corporation or its management. I do not claim ownership of any of the media in this blog. where possible credit and or source will always be given. If one of your photos or other media is submitted in this blog and you would like it removed please let me know.

Blogs I follow:

Theme by: Miguel
  1. HOW WHITE DWARFS MIMIC BLACK HOLES A remarkable observation by astronomers from the University of Southampton has been published in one of the world’s foremost astrophysics research journals. The research by Professor Phil Charles, Professor Malcolm Coe and postgraduate student Liz Bartlett has appeared in The Astrophysical Journal that is devoted to recent developments, discoveries, and theories in astronomy and astrophysics. The Southampton Physics and Astronomy team are part of a global collaboration — with colleagues in Taiwan, South Africa, Poland, Australia and Italy — that has revealed that bright X-ray flares in nearby galaxies, once assumed to indicate the presence of black holes, can in fact be produced by white dwarfs. They made the discovery by detecting a dramatic, short-lived X-ray flare that was picked up by an X-ray telescope on the International Space Station. Using optical telescopes in South Africa and Chile, the Southampton astronomers showed that the flare, called XRF111111 as it happened on 11 November 2011, was located in the Small Magellanic Cloud. The Magellanic Clouds are between 160,000 and 200,000 light-years away and are the nearest satellite galaxies to the Milky Way. They are visible to the naked eye from the Southern Hemisphere. The flare from XRF111111 was so luminous that astronomers initially thought it was likely to be a black hole producing X-rays but further research by Phil and his team revealed that its X-ray temperature was so low that it had to be a white dwarf instead. White dwarfs are very common, burnt-out cinders of normal stars like the Sun that are typically about one solar mass but are contained in a volume no bigger than the Earth. However, white dwarfs were not considered capable of producing such a huge X-ray flash but the optical observations in South Africa and Chile showed that the white dwarf was orbiting a hot B star — a normal star about 10 times the mass of our Sun that is much hotter and brighter. This was something that had only been seen twice previously and both times with much lower X-ray luminosities. Research by Professor Charles and his team revealed that material was probably collecting on the surface of the white dwarf from the B star and eventually underwent runaway thermonuclear burning that was seen on Earth as a nova explosion. Professor Charles says: “Our observations show that the thermonuclear burning probably caused a shell of matter to be ejected from around the white dwarf and when the shell hit the hot wind of the B star it produced a huge shock leading to the X-ray flash that was seen on the International Space Station. “We think that this incredible X-ray flash was not due to accretion onto a black hole but was instead due to a nova explosion on a white dwarf that took place close to a hot massive star. This was something that we, as astronomers, have never seen before. “This surprising result shows that, in the right circumstances, white dwarfs are capable of mimicking black holes, the most luminous objects we know of.”

    HOW WHITE DWARFS MIMIC BLACK HOLES

    A remarkable observation by astronomers from the University of Southampton has been published in one of the world’s foremost astrophysics research journals.

    The research by Professor Phil Charles, Professor Malcolm Coe and postgraduate student Liz Bartlett has appeared in The Astrophysical Journal that is devoted to recent developments, discoveries, and theories in astronomy and astrophysics.

    The Southampton Physics and Astronomy team are part of a global collaboration — with colleagues in Taiwan, South Africa, Poland, Australia and Italy — that has revealed that bright X-ray flares in nearby galaxies, once assumed to indicate the presence of black holes, can in fact be produced by white dwarfs.

    They made the discovery by detecting a dramatic, short-lived X-ray flare that was picked up by an X-ray telescope on the International Space Station.

    Using optical telescopes in South Africa and Chile, the Southampton astronomers showed that the flare, called XRF111111 as it happened on 11 November 2011, was located in the Small Magellanic Cloud. The Magellanic Clouds are between 160,000 and 200,000 light-years away and are the nearest satellite galaxies to the Milky Way. They are visible to the naked eye from the Southern Hemisphere.

    The flare from XRF111111 was so luminous that astronomers initially thought it was likely to be a black hole producing X-rays but further research by Phil and his team revealed that its X-ray temperature was so low that it had to be a white dwarf instead.

    White dwarfs are very common, burnt-out cinders of normal stars like the Sun that are typically about one solar mass but are contained in a volume no bigger than the Earth.

    However, white dwarfs were not considered capable of producing such a huge X-ray flash but the optical observations in South Africa and Chile showed that the white dwarf was orbiting a hot B star — a normal star about 10 times the mass of our Sun that is much hotter and brighter. This was something that had only been seen twice previously and both times with much lower X-ray luminosities.

    Research by Professor Charles and his team revealed that material was probably collecting on the surface of the white dwarf from the B star and eventually underwent runaway thermonuclear burning that was seen on Earth as a nova explosion.

    Professor Charles says: “Our observations show that the thermonuclear burning probably caused a shell of matter to be ejected from around the white dwarf and when the shell hit the hot wind of the B star it produced a huge shock leading to the X-ray flash that was seen on the International Space Station.

    “We think that this incredible X-ray flash was not due to accretion onto a black hole but was instead due to a nova explosion on a white dwarf that took place close to a hot massive star. This was something that we, as astronomers, have never seen before. “This surprising result shows that, in the right circumstances, white dwarfs are capable of mimicking black holes, the most luminous objects we know of.”

    2. 3 Notes
    1. abcstarstuff posted this