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hue The Standard Model
Try to pull a single quark and snap the gluon thread, You'll only make a brand-new pair of quarks right there instead.
hue Quarks are held together by a unique property called color charge, which has nothing to do with real colors.
Quark naming history: Murray Gell-Mann named 'quarks' after a whimsical line about 'three quarks for Muster Mark' in James Joyce's 1939 novel Finnegans Wake.
hue Quarks come in six distinct varieties, or 'flavors', each with unique properties.
Any of a class of subatomic particles that carry a fractional electric charge and are the building blocks of hadrons. In 1964, Murray Gell-Mann proposed this particle, which interacts with leptons and bosons to form atomic structure.
Which two physicists independently proposed the existence of quarks in 1964?
What literary work inspired the name of the subatomic quark?
What are the three types of 'color charge' that quarks carry?
What is the collective name for particles made of bound quarks, such as protons and neutrons?
Why can scientists never observe a single quark on its own?
Which of the six quark flavors is the heaviest, weighing about as much as a gold atom?
hue Wolf-Rayet stars are massive, hot, rapidly dying stars that end their brief lives as supernovae.
hue Neutron Stars
Heavy teaspoon, heavy teaspoon / Six billion tons in a single spoon!
hue Irish astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered the first neutron star in 1967 using a hand-built radio telescope.
Neutron star density: A single teaspoon of neutron star material would weigh as much as Mount Everest.
hue Neutron stars pack the mass of a giant sun into a sphere the size of a city.
A star that suddenly increases greatly in brightness because of a catastrophic explosion that ejects most of its mass. In 1054, Chinese astronomers recorded one such explosion that created the famous Crab Nebula neutron star.
What is the approximate weight of a teaspoon of neutron star material?
How much stronger is a neutron star's crust compared to steel?
hue In Cambridge, graduate student Bell Burnell discovered a rapidly spinning neutron star pulsing every 1.3 seconds.
What was the humorous nickname given to the first pulsing radio signal detected from space?
What subatomic particles are forced together to form neutrons during a star's collapse?
Which historical astronomers recorded the supernova of 1054 CE that created the Crab Nebula?
What is the minimum mass a star must have to eventually form a neutron star?
hue In 2008, physicists explained that any microscopic black holes created by CERN would be completely harmless.
hue Black holes of any size contain a singularity, and some hypothetical quasi-stars have black holes inside.
hue Black Hole Anatomy
Past the event horizon, falling right in, no light escapes!
hue Superheated gas and dust swirl around the black hole, glowing brightly before they fall in.
Gravitational lensing: Black holes bend light like a cosmic magnifying glass, warping the image of stars behind them.
hue At the very center of a black hole lies the singularity, where all matter is crushed into zero volume.
The boundary surrounding a black hole from which no matter or radiation can escape. In 2022, the Event Horizon Telescope captured the first direct image of this boundary around Sagittarius A.
At what speed would an object need to travel to escape a black hole once inside the event horizon?
What is the infinitely dense point at the center of a black hole called?
What optical effect occurs when a black hole's gravity bends light from stars behind it?
Whose theory of general relativity predicted the mathematical possibility of black holes?
What causes the accretion disk around a black hole to glow so brightly?
What type of radiation is primarily emitted by the superheated matter in a black hole's accretion disk?