The LIUniverse with Dr. Charles Liu
Mar 21, 2026 · 40 min · 11 segments
How do stars die? And what happens when they do? To find out, Dr. Charles Liu and co-host Allen Liu welcome Dr. Ashley Villar, who teaches astronomy at Harvard and whose team studies supernovas as…
Ashley VillarGuest
Charles LiuHostAllen LiuHost
It is just very fitting that today's joyfully cool cosmic thing of the day has to do with one of the most famous exploding stars in our sky.
The joyfully cool cosmic thing of the day is... a set of new images released by the scientists who use the Hubble Space Telescope of the Crab Nebula and its pulsar at the center.
For those of you who don't know, The Crab Nebula Pulsar is the remnant of an exploding star supernova explosion which was first observed in the year 1054.
Astronomers actually recorded that this thing happened and then it wasn't until the 1960s though that actually we were able to take a picture and confirm that the little star in there was pulsing with light and energy and spewing out x-rays And it's in the center of this beautiful expanding pulsar.
And Hubble was used to take great pictures of it back in the 1990s and then again around 2005.
And it is so much fun to be able to lay the pictures down one on top of the other and watch that gas flow and see things change in real time.
We think of astronomy and stars and planets as like always up in the sky, never changing, but this is like stuff happening and we can see it from year to year.
Ashley, you must have so much fun being able to watch these things evolve, right?
It really is one of my favorite things about what I get to do is in astronomy, there's so like comically cosmic timescales.
So We study massive stars and we say they die young, and that means that they die in millions of years.
Right, right.
So
It is just very fitting that today's joyfully cool cosmic thing of the day has to do with one of the most famous exploding stars in our sky.
The joyfully cool cosmic thing of the day is... a set of new images released by the scientists who use the Hubble Space Telescope of the Crab Nebula and its pulsar at the center.
For those of you who don't know, The Crab Nebula Pulsar is the remnant of an exploding star supernova explosion which was first observed in the year 1054.
Astronomers actually recorded that this thing happened and then it wasn't until the 1960s though that actually we were able to take a picture and confirm that the little star in there was pulsing with light and energy and spewing out x-rays And it's in the center of this beautiful expanding pulsar.
And Hubble was used to take great pictures of it back in the 1990s and then again around 2005.
And it is so much fun to be able to lay the pictures down one on top of the other and watch that gas flow and see things change in real time.
We think of astronomy and stars and planets as like always up in the sky, never changing, but this is like stuff happening and we can see it from year to year.
Ashley, you must have so much fun being able to watch these things evolve, right?
It really is one of my favorite things about what I get to do is in astronomy, there's so like comically cosmic timescales.
So We study massive stars and we say they die young, and that means that they die in millions of years.
Right, right.
So
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