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  Why underwater nuclear explosions get fingersNov 07, 2014 4:08 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Probably the most helpful thing I found when trying to figure out how to draw an underwater explosion was a sorta educational film from 1943, "UNDERWATER EXPLOSION PHENOMENA," which demonstrates some interesting properties of small underwater explosions, like how the gas bubble created, collapsing and rebounding off itself in increasingly tiny bubbles (each bubble has only 40% of the energy of the previous one), in effect moves toward nearby surfaces.
 
I was somewhat surprised to find that Wikipedia has an "Underwater explosion" page. It's mostly about the characteristics of nuclear explosions in the water, for some reason, which makes it kind of interesting. There were only eight underwater nuclear test series held—five by the US, three by the USSR—before underwater nuclear testing was banned under the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963. One interesting factoid Wikipedia has gleaned from those tests: "At its maximum diameter (during the first oscillation), a very large nuclear bomb exploded in very deep water creates a bubble about a half-mile wide in about one second, and then contracts (which also takes one second)."
 
Also, in underwater nuclear explosions, the gas in the center, pushing against the heavier water around it, is pierced by the water in a delicate filigree of tendrils due to the instability in the interface of the differing densities of material, called the Rayleigh-Taylor instability. The same phenomenon occurs in supernova explosions, and accounts for, for instance, the many spidery fingers of the Crab Nebula, which is the remnant of the supernova explosion recorded by Chinese astronomers in 1054, and seen here by Hubble in 2005:
 
Image
photo by NASA, ESA, J. Hester and A. Loll (Arizona State University) (source)
 
 
 
 
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