Schedule Mar 23, 2011
Life After Stellar Death: Supernovae, Neutron Stars, Pulsars, and Black Holes
Edward van den Heuvel, University of Amsterdam

Neutron stars are the most compact concentrations of "normal" matter known in nature, with the strongest gravitational fields. They are the collapsed remnants of the burned-out cores of stars that started out life with masses larger than about eight times that of our sun. Everything about neutron stars is extreme: their density, gravity, magnetic field and spin. They are spheres not larger than New York City, which contain over 400,000 times the mass of Earth, so compressed that a thimblefull of their material contains as much matter as half a million Boeing 747 Jumbo jets filled with passengers and cargo. Their surface gravity attraction is a hundred billion times that on Earth, their magnetic fields are typically a trillion times stronger than that of Earth, and their spin frequencies can be higher than 700 times per second. In the past 44 years, over 1800 neutron stars have been discovered, most of them as radio pulsars, regularly pulsing sources of radio waves, but also hundreds as sources of X and . rays. Stellar black holes are the burned-out cores of stars more massive than about twenty times the sun. They can become X-ray sources if they are in binary systems, stealing matter from a companion star.

Edward van den Heuvel was born in 1940 in Soest, The Netherlands and received his Ph.D. at the University of Utrecht in 1968. He worked at the University of California, Santa Cruz from 1968 to 1969 and at the Universities of Utrecht, 1969 to 1974, and Brussels, 1970 to 1980. Since 1974 he has been Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Amsterdam and, until 2005, Director of the Astronomical Institute there. In 1995 he was awarded the Spinoza Prize, the highest science prize of the Netherlands, and in 2002, the EU Descartes Prize, the highest science prize of the European Commission, Brussels. Professor van den Heuvel.s fields of expertise include stellar evolution, the physics of neutron stars and black holes, X and .-ray astronomy and radio pulsars.

Introduction by David Gross.


Begin Flash full motion video, or Flash lower bandwidth video. (Or, right-click to download the 3gp file.)

Begin QuickTime full motion movie or Quicktime lower bandwidth movie.
(Or, right-click to download the lower bandwidth movie.) (Or, right-click to download the podcast.)

Begin streaming RealMedia. (Or, right-click to download the audio file.)

To begin viewing slides, click on the first slide below. (Or, view as pdf.)


[01] [02] [03] [04] [05] [06] [07] [08] [09] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] [21] [22] [23] [24] [25] [26] [27] [28] [29] [30] [31] [32] [33] [34] [35] [36] [37] [38] [39] [40] [41] [42] [43] [44] [45] [46] [47] [48] [49] [50] [51] [52] [53] [54] [55] [56] [57] [58] [59] [60] [61] [62] [63] [64] [65] [66] [67] [68] [69] [70] [71] [72] [73] [74] [75] [76] [77] [78] [79] [80] [81] [82] [83] [84] [85] [86] [87] [88] [89] [90] [91] [92] [93] [94] [95] [96] [97] [98] [99] [100]

Author entry (protected)