My Z News

Mankind’s fascination with space is a curiosity that will never be fully satisfied. Since we first looked up and gazed upon the night sky, we have always wondered what’s out there. Theories have existed for centuries, but it is only within the last couple that we have truly begun to understand the workings of the universe around us.

It is our curiosity of the stars that has driven us to launch countless satellites, probes, and telescopes into space. We even accomplished what many thought to be impossible, by having manned missions to the moon and constructing a space station. Even though we have come so far in our understanding of the final frontier, there is still so much more to learn and observe. With space travel and rocket development now open to corporations and businesses, interest in space exploration is accelerating. Companies like Blue Origin and SpaceX are already making history by successfully developing reusable rockets, and Virgin Galactic is developing suborbital spaceflights to kick-start the space tourism industry. The strides we have made in the past decade are incredible, and one can only imagine where we will be in just a few decades.

Recently, NASA’s Kepler space telescope observed a cataclysmic natural phenomenon that occurred 1.2 billion light-years away – an exploding star. The information gathered from the telescope is hard to interpret, so NASA has used the data to develop a model of what it would look like if observed with our eyes. The video shows what experts call a “shock breakout,” which happens when the nuclear fusion process within a star is no longer sustainable.

The destructive power of the resulting blast is truly a sight to behold.

H/T: NASA

Read more: http://www.wimp.com/exploding-star-nasa-time-lapse/