🚀 go-pugleaf

>In article <5cp349$poq$1@news1.sympatico.ca>, gbuchanan@sympatico.ca wrote:
>> >>So, I'm trying to collect posters' favorite Things in Math & Science.


The rings around supernova 1987A. I may be prejudiced, though (see my 
homepage; the URL is in my .sig). The rings are huge, offcenter, and 
there is only the barest trace of bipolar material between
them. After ten years we still don't know how they formed.
The whole system is screaming through the interstellar matter around
it, leaving a tremendous cavity. The supernova debris, weighing
in the solar mass range and moving at 1/10 or so the speed
of light, will slam into the relatively dense outer ring in the
next decade, the first time we will have ever seen something like 
that happen. Plus, no confirmed pulsar yet (though some tantalizing 
reports have been made). 

Sometimes I can imagine what it must look like to be floating 
about a half light year from the expanding debris, the inner ring
a ghostly green band circling the sky, the outer rings also
cutting a chord across the heavens. As you rotate, the distorted 
disc of the supernova debris, blinding and terrifying,
occupies a huge chunk of the sky. You know that it is unstoppable,
a flaming screaming mass of hell and fire that will sweep past you,
engulfing you and vaporising your very atoms...

Yeegads. I'm rather glad I am 180,000 light years away.


-- 
* Phil Plait, Pee Aytch Dee       pcp2g@virginia.edu 
* My home page-- http://www.astro.virginia.edu/~pcp2g/home.html
*      -->  Humor, supernovae, Bad Astronomy, Mad Science
*           and my daughter Zoe.