You Rock!

Rocks aren't alive. Life is.

So think of them as separate. Rocks over here; life over there.

Then along come Robert Hazen and his colleagues with their study, "Mineral Evolution," published in the American Mineralogist and all of a sudden categories shatter. I'm amazed. I hadn't thought of this, even remotely.

Here's what they found:

To hear the story, listen closely to how you rock! NPR

A SUPERNOVA thanks to Hubble...

This Hubble Space Telescope photograph shows supernova, 1987A, with its three rings. Material from the explosion has begun to hit the inner ring.

This explosion happens because the center, or core, of the star collapses in less than a second. The outer layers of the star are blown off in the explosion, leaving a contracting core of the star after the supernova. The shock waves and material that fly out from the supernova can cause the formation of new stars. There are many beautiful images of supernova remnants, the expanding shell of gas made up of the outer layers of the original star.

Supernovae last one or two years, and can shine brighter than a whole galaxy for this time. What happens to the star after the supernova depends on how big it was to begin with. If the star was only a few times bigger than the Sun, the core will shrink into a tiny neutron star only a few miles across. If the star was much bigger than the Sun, the core will shrink down to a black hole.

A typical neutron star is the size of a small city, only 10 Kilometers in diameter but it may have the mass of as many as three suns. It is quite dense. One spoonful of neutron star material on Earth would weigh as much as all the cars on Earth put together.

Now that's HEAVY!

States of matter.

This figure shows the four common states of matter: solid, liquid, gas, and plasma.

Consider water as an example. Solid water is ice. Liquid water is, well, water. We call water in its gaseous form "water vapor". A plasma created from water would include electrons, protons (hydrogen atom nuclei), and oxygen atom nuclei (protons and neutrons).

There are special names for most transitions from one state to another. Freezing is turning from a liquid to a solid; melting is turning from a solid to a liquid. The transition from liquid to gas can happen by boiling or evaporation. Condensation is changing from a gas to a liquid. Sometimes (usually at low pressure) a solid can become a gas directly (without first melting to become a liquid); this transformation is called "sublimation". Removing electrons from atoms (usually in a gas) to produce a plasma is called "ionization".

Stars are made of plasma, so plasma is the most abundant form of matter in the universe.

There are several other very exotic and unusual forms of matter that we don't encounter in daily life. A Bose-Einstein condensate can only form at temperature near absolute zero, and was first created in a lab in 1995. Degenerate matter can come into being under incredibly high pressure inside white dwarf and neutron stars. There are other very strange, very rare forms of matter as well.

Last modified June 25, 2008 by Randy Russell.

Run through this over view of "matter"- take notes






Now go to STRANGE MATTER

What do you think?