On 2006-12-24 14:30:55 +0000, "Eric Gisse" said:

This means a huuuuuuuuge star is doing it, or a black hole is doing it.


As far as I know, huge stars can only die in two ways:

a) Burn fast and explode :

We see this all the time - our old friend the Type II supernova.

b) Get so fat that it outright collapses:

I haven't heard of these happening recently in the cosmic sense. It was
my understanding that the only star that could pull a trick like that
was a Wolf-Rayet star, a star that masses several hundred solar masses.

It would have to be truly massive, as the really big stars can lose via
stellar winds a thousandth of a solar mass per year or more - which
over the average lifetime of these stars (being around a few million
years) means they quickly shrink down...

--

For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to
persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

Carl Sagan


--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com