The Crab Nebula | David Rives

The Crab Nebula, also known as Messier 1, was the very first of 110 objects to be catalogued by the French astronomer Charles Messier. He mistook this nebula for a comet upon first observation, and thus began the famous Messier catalogue. This colorful nebula is quite bright, and fairly easy to spot using a moderately … Read More

What is a Pulsar? | David Rives

If you ask the average person to name some things found in “outer space” they’ll probably name the moon, stars, planets, and maybe asteroids and comets. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg of the incredible diversity found throughout the cosmos. Today let’s look at pulsars. We’ve only known about pulsars since the 1960’s, … Read More

A Star Is Born | David Rives

The common idea of stellar nurseries, claims that stars are born into existence as nebulous areas of space contract, forming a dense ball of gas. It sounds like a plausible explanation for the origin of stars in the universe. However, one big problem with this theory is that while we HAVE seen stars DESTROYED when … Read More