Posted by
timothy
on from the strange-premonition dept.
ScottMan writes: "I found this link over at ABC News about some new pictures HST took. It shows a dying star, much like our own sun. Kind of interesting to see what our solar system might look like in another 5 billion years or so."
Re:Our legacy, and an argument against encryption.
by
Tarnar
·
· Score: 2
Yeah, but as long as our protocols aren't encrypted, then you should be able to detect the redundancy inside it..
Even when I send encrypted data over TCP/IP, I get all the FIN's and ACK's and what not. Even if the content is never read, lets hope the protocol is noticed.
Here's a cute little argument that predicts that mankind has a roughly one-in-two chance of ceasing to exist within five hundred years (and therefore probably won't be around when the sun dies). It uses the Anthropic principle, but backward. I am roughly translating from the not e in French I wrote on the subject.
Imagine the following game. Somebody chooses a positive (real) number x. He then picks a random number y uniformly distributed between 0 and x, and tells it to me. My goal is to guess what x was. If I state that "x is between y and 2y", then the probability of my being right is the probability of y being being beween x/2 and x (that's the same thing), so it is 1/2 because y was uniformly distributed between 0 and x. That's trivial. And in practice if you play this game, it is a sensible thing to guess that x is between y and 2y.
Now it evidently doesn't make sense to take for x the total lifespan of humanity, because men are not uniformly distributed along it. So we take for x the total number of human beings that will have lived in the entire duration of humanity. We would like to know what x is. We don't have a clue. However, one thing we do know is how many people have lived so far, or, which is roughly the same thing, your (or my) "rank number" in the list of all human beings (in order of birth). This number, y, is of the order of 8*10^10 (80 billion that is). Further, since you (or I) have no reason of being one given human being than another, y is uniformly distributed between 0 and x. Consequently, we can apply the result I just gave, and conclude that x has one chance out of two of being between y=8*10^10 and 2y=1.5*10^11.
Translated in other words, it means that there is one chance out of two that less than 80 billion human beings have yet to live (or be born). With a current rate of 1.5*10^7 (150 million) born each year, assuming it does not decrease considerably, this brings us 500 years hence. I think this is a sensible order of magnitude.
(Of course, the same reasoning also shows that there is a better than one-in-twenty chance of "doomsday" befalling within our lifetime. That's a rather chilling thought.)
In case it wasn't obvious, this post is to be taken as "Ha, ha, only serious". If you want more thoughts on the same line, see here.
Re:How long will mankind last?
by
Steve+B
·
· Score: 3
Now it evidently doesn't make sense to take for x the total lifespan of humanity, because men are not uniformly distributed along it. So we take for x the total number of human beings that will have lived in the entire duration of humanity. We would like to know what x is. We don't have a clue. However, one thing we do know is how many people have lived so far, or, which is roughly the same thing, your (or my) "rank number" in the list of all human beings (in order of birth). This number, y, is of the order of 8*10^10 (80 billion that is). Further, since you (or I) have no reason of being one given human being than another, y is uniformly distributed between 0 and x. Consequently, we can apply the result I just gave, and conclude that x has one chance out of two of being between y=8*10^10 and 2y=1.5*10^11.
The obvious fallacy is that Og the caveman, Euclid, Charlemagne, or Isaac Newton could, in principle, have done the same calculation (with the values of y and birthrate appropriate to their times) and gotten radically different expected dates for Doomsday. Thus, either the assumption of uniformity is wrong or the calculation is fundamentally broken.
/.
-- /.
If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Re:How long will mankind last?
by
David+A.+Madore
·
· Score: 2
Beeep. Notice how I said that this was not a certainty but only a probability of one in two? And that's precisely the point: half of mankind (the "latter half") could make the computation and they would be right in the interval they find, whereas the other half would be wrong. Thus, there is no fallacy involved, only probabilities. There is no date involved, only an interval.
You should realize that more than half of all men that have been born so far have been born in the last two hundred years. You may get the impression that "Og the caveman, Euclid, Charlemagne or Newton" cover a vast part of the timeline of humanity, but in terms of numbers of birth, they do not.
The more dubious assertion is that the birth rate will remain over or about 150 million per year in the coming five centuries. But there, I don't know how to improve upon this.
Re:How long will mankind last?
by
Steve+B
·
· Score: 2
You may get the impression that "Og the caveman, Euclid, Charlemagne or Newton" cover a vast part of the timeline of humanity, but in terms of numbers of birth, they do not.
You have missed the point. Each of them does cover a vast part of the timeline of humanity in terms of numbers of birth by the evidence available to each in his own time. If no particular individual is privileged, then each, using human history up to and including his own time, can make an equally valid calculation of how long the human race can be expected to endure into the future (again, from his own time as the baseline). Looking back on it from our viewpoint, we can see that each calculation is meaningless -- just as someone looking back from two thousand years in the future will dismiss our own similar calculations. /.
-- /.
If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Re:How long will mankind last?
by
David+A.+Madore
·
· Score: 2
Look, suppose we have a six-sided die and every man throws it once. I say "we have five chances out of six of not hitting the number one". You will agree with that, I hope. Well, of course you can point out a lot of people will hit the number one, and from their point of view the fact that "hitting one is pretty unlikely" is worthless, but the probability is still valid.
It is a trivial fact that half of humanity will be born in the "second half" of humanity, and they will be justified in their belief that there will be fewer people born after them than before.
Since we have no reason to believe that we are more likely to be in the former half than in the latter half, I say we have a one chance in two of being in the latter, and I draw the conclusions in that case. This is perfectly trivial reasoning.
Naturally, you can cite a lot of people who have lived in what we are now sure to be the former half, and they would be wrong in believing that they are in the latter half. I can't cite anyone sure to be in the latter half because we can never know for sure when it starts. But it evidently must exist, and it must contain as many people as the former half.
I don't know why people find this reasoning hard to accept: it's basically very simple.
Maybe you find that distressing and pessimistic. Well, here's another result which is more optimistic, then. As previously, let y=8*10^10 be the number of people who have lived so far, and x be the total number of people to live in the entire time span of humanity. The probability that x is at least equal to ky (for some real number k>1) is 1/k. If you calculate the mean expectancy of a so distributed random variable, you will find the integral to be divergent: the expectancy is infinite.
Thus, while there is a 1/2 probability that the number of people yet to live is at most 80 billion, the average number is infinite. Mind-boggling. But obvious.
Don't trsut me: do the math. And, of course, still ha, ha, only serious.
I thought that the post was terrifically funny. I don't have any mod points, so I can't give you any. I can do something for you though. Since Slashdot is a zero sum game, my loss is your gain! I've got over 200 karma, and this message congratulating you should surely be modded down. You get your reward one way or another...
Our legacy, and an argument against encryption.
by
devapoj
·
· Score: 5
4.9 billion years hence, assuming that only cockroaches and lawyers for the MPAA exist, what kind of legacy are we leaving for the inhabitants of a new star with new life, billions of light years away. With a plethora of PCs running their version of seti@home, what chance do they have of picking up our civilisation.
Practically none when you think about it.
By that time, encryption will be so advanced it'd take a billion years to develop the hardware and probably another billion to crack the zillion-bit encryption code used to ensure we all have to pay lots of samolens for our classic "Simpsons". Laws will be passed to shield monitors and television sets to prevent old-fashioned analogue interception of what is considered the property of the movie studios. In other words, if aliens do pick up anythign, it would be so unintelligible that it makes no difference from the randomness of background noise in space.
Even today, with power levels going down and down, smaller sattelite dishes and (relatively) simple compression, we are slowly but surely destroying any chance of aliens detecting us. A decade ago, it would be conceivable for someone to constuct from scratch the apparatus to decode a television signal. Now, how would we get past the stage of constructing a viewing card?
I know it's off topic, but it's the closest topic I've seen for a long time to put forward this line of thought:-)
Just some random thoughts off the top of my head before I go to bed tonight... Please don't take it seriously.
--
Karma makes sense. It makes a lot more sense if you add reincarnation.
Re:Our legacy, and an argument against encryption.
by
radja
·
· Score: 3
if the martians ever intercept terran tv-signals, they better not save it to disk. MPAA will sue them for copyright infringement. under US law. because US law is Universal (or was that Warner?).
//rdj
--
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
Nice image.. Sol wont die like that though
by
smooge
·
· Score: 2
Since that is a double star system, the dynamics wont be exactly the same. What is supposedly happening there is a one old star is feeding another one causing a massive jetstream to be blown off of it.
I think a better idea of what the sun might look like in 5 billion years is more likely looking at Betelgeuse (ok its much more massive but the idea is correct.) You are going to see it bloat out,
eat the planets and then possibly there might be an interesting effect where Jupiter will eat up some of the gas from the Sun and possibly become a brown dwarf. This would be a long shot, but more likely at the 8-10 billion stage where the sun is becoming a white dwarf and spewing 50% of its mass off in a "planetary nebula"
-- weee I get to use my Astrophysics degree for the first time in 7 years!!!!
Well, it may not have come to English from Swedish - though a lot of olde english words are old viking toungue -, but "sol" is the Swedish word for "sun".
C'mon people, we know it won't die. The Network Is The Computer. All that high-powered hardware and nifty Java code will outlive everything else in the universe.
Or do you mean that other Sun? (grin) --
-- Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Is the question really interesting at all? It apparently took a mere 10 million years for a land-based mammal to evolve into whales. In five billion years, humans might even have evolved into energy-based creatures like in Babylon 5. For certain, they will not lokka bit like the humans of today - who don't even look like the humans of a trifle 10,000 years ago.
It's saddening, to see what one day may happen to our own star.... Slowly aging and ebbing further away, more and more insignificant as time goes on. I mean, really, the Sun deserves a better ending than just wasting away, doesn't it? Our sun has done such good for us, I think the least we can do is pay it back by ensuring that its end is as spectacular as possible! Who's with me? All right! I'm going out right now and starting the Obliterate Sol Campaign!
5 billion years from now, there's gonna be a hell of a lightshow!
Come on! I'm an American! I don't even care what the earth looks like 5 years from now. All I know is that it's my kid's problem, and they better fix it so they can put me in a good nursing home. I need to go now, there's a bucket of used car oil out front and it isn't dumping itself in the gutter.
Timothy, please read the article before posting. As you know, many ppl here don't bother to read the article and comment based on what the/. crew posts. Additionally, this is "old" news as yahoo featured this as a science item a few days ago. Please don't post abcnews articles as this site tries to send you eighteen gazillion cookies. Furthermore, this event took place a long time ago; the light is just reaching us today.
The article says that this might involve a red giant star and a white dwarf star, both in their death throes. Last time I look, this planet does not orbit around dual suns. Perhaps, you think that you are still on Tatooine. Get over with it! Your uncle and aunt are gone. The key things is this.
Hubble astronomers believe the object is actually two aging stars masquerading as a single youngster.
Sure, planetary nebulae are pretty and impressive, but that's not what humanity should be worried about, at least as far as our sun goes. Current theories of stellar evolution point out that already, the Sol should have a sizable core of He "ash" that isn't yet hot enough to fuse into higher elements. As this He core grows, the pressure will build under the force of gravity, causing both the core temperature to rise and the sun to shrink. Solar luminosity could increase by a factor of 10% over the next 100 million years.
If this doesn't sound like much, recall that climatologists predict dire consequences of a 1-2 degree greenhouse effect. A 10% increase in solar output would cause much worse heating. However, we humans wouldn't even last that long. The seas regulate greenhouse gasses by locking up carbonates in seabed sediment; increase the temperature (a little) and the rate of deposition increases. Unfortunately, increase solar output by about 5% and this process runs away. Result: no more oxygen in our atmosphere. Or carbon dioxide, for that matter, so the forests won't help then. By the time Sol gets to +10% luminosity, we're talking about oceans at a rolling boil. The atmosphere fills up with water vapour, solar radiation spits this into oxygen and hydrogen (unfortunately the oxygen at this point is too late to do any good) and the hydrogen escapes to space. Poof -- 200 million years and the Earth is as dry as Venus, and possibly as acidic.
Now how's Mars sound?
--
Quantum mechanics: the dreams that stuff is made of.
Luckily Moore's Law applies to suncreen as well as CPU power with SPF rating doubling every 18 months or so.
By the year 10870 we should have sunscreen capable of SPF 2.6 * e^16, or enough to protect 1/3 of the population of Kentucky from the nasty rash that would develop as our star explodes.
Thank god the dark cold world of the future will contain the pale, personable, people from Kentucky.
-- Intergalactics - A pretty cool strategy game in a java applet
"Hubble astronomers believe the object is actually two aging stars masquerading as a single youngster."
Last time I checked, we weren't living in a binary star system with a white dwarf compainion. I'd trust Hubble astronomers over ABCNews any day. Just another troll post, it seems.
Actually, the sun will be around for a long time.
by
meckardt
·
· Score: 4
The subject of this article is the binary star that Hubble saw in the process of leaving the main sequence as its hydrogen runs out. But when this happens to a star, it is not the end of its life.
A star with the mass of the Sun blows off a lot of its material as it goes nova, but eventually the remenants (certainly less than 1/2 the original mass) turn into a white dwarf star. While this type of star isn't undergoing a lot of fusion at its core any more, it takes quite a while for the remaining energy to radiate into space. But eventually, the white dwarf will cool off. You might call the result a black dwarf... but its still there.
This month's (October 2000) Astronomy Magazine (http://www.astronomy.com/) has an article speculating about this very thing: what happens to stars (actually, what happens to the ENTIRE UNIVERSE) after the nuclear fuel runs out. What I got out of this article is that all those burned out stars are going to be around for a very, VERY long time... on the order of 10^40 (10,000 trillion trillion trillion) years. That is how much time it is estimated it will take before proton decay will eventually evaporate everything (except perhaps some black holes).
So all those who were worried that the sun was only good for another 5 billion years, take heart! Except for the fact that none of us will live through its transformation, we would have plenty of time to enjoy our planet's primary.
There are many humor impaired moderators here. You had a good, funny idea and got the third freaking post. Nice. If you got the 2nd or 4th post, then I would mod you down. But the ability to think quickly, and execute should be worth something.
I've seen a lot of 1st posts. Most are pretty lame. My two favorites is one guy who posted a rambling, but interesting comment. However, he selectively highlighted (bold letters) a sequence of letters that spelled out, well you know. The other was a/. interview with someone. He then posted (wasn't the 1st) something like, "First Post, sorry I couldn't resist". He got moderated up and down. It was very funny as he clearly understood/.
The moderators will probably drop my post down. Fine by me. But they are, as a major US politician stated, "major-league asshole(s)".
Back OT. This involves two dying suns. The Earth orbits one. This may involve one very young sun. The Earth doesn't orbit a very young sun. So what does this have to do with the price of eggs?
I was wondering how they can tell the difference between a new star, and this star (these stars??). The article says it is behaving in the same manner, so how can they tell?
Spectroscopy would be one way. If the star pair is rich in helium or heavy elements and the surrounding nebula isn't, that would indicate that the stars have been burning for quite some time.
Environment is another way. If the star pair is inside a star-forming nebula, then there's a decent chance that it's young. No nebula, and it's probably old.
Structure is another. If it's confirmed that one of the pair is a white dwarf, then it's most likely an old binary system (alternative is a protostar that captured a white dwarf). White dwarf stars are what you get when a star the size of the sun exhausts its fuel (after the red giant stages).
I have no idea which technique of the above, if any, was used for the star pair in question. The article didn't go into much detail.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but as long as our protocols aren't encrypted, then you should be able to detect the redundancy inside it..
Even when I send encrypted data over TCP/IP, I get all the FIN's and ACK's and what not. Even if the content is never read, lets hope the protocol is noticed.
If you're a true American, like myself, you'd shoot holes in the bucket with your handgun so it would empty itself out. Sheesh. :)
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
--I assume full responsibility for my actions, except the ones that are someone else's fault.
Here's a cute little argument that predicts that mankind has a roughly one-in-two chance of ceasing to exist within five hundred years (and therefore probably won't be around when the sun dies). It uses the Anthropic principle, but backward. I am roughly translating from the not e in French I wrote on the subject.
Imagine the following game. Somebody chooses a positive (real) number x. He then picks a random number y uniformly distributed between 0 and x, and tells it to me. My goal is to guess what x was. If I state that "x is between y and 2y", then the probability of my being right is the probability of y being being beween x/2 and x (that's the same thing), so it is 1/2 because y was uniformly distributed between 0 and x. That's trivial. And in practice if you play this game, it is a sensible thing to guess that x is between y and 2y.
Now it evidently doesn't make sense to take for x the total lifespan of humanity, because men are not uniformly distributed along it. So we take for x the total number of human beings that will have lived in the entire duration of humanity. We would like to know what x is. We don't have a clue. However, one thing we do know is how many people have lived so far, or, which is roughly the same thing, your (or my) "rank number" in the list of all human beings (in order of birth). This number, y, is of the order of 8*10^10 (80 billion that is). Further, since you (or I) have no reason of being one given human being than another, y is uniformly distributed between 0 and x. Consequently, we can apply the result I just gave, and conclude that x has one chance out of two of being between y=8*10^10 and 2y=1.5*10^11.
Translated in other words, it means that there is one chance out of two that less than 80 billion human beings have yet to live (or be born). With a current rate of 1.5*10^7 (150 million) born each year, assuming it does not decrease considerably, this brings us 500 years hence. I think this is a sensible order of magnitude.
(Of course, the same reasoning also shows that there is a better than one-in-twenty chance of "doomsday" befalling within our lifetime. That's a rather chilling thought.)
In case it wasn't obvious, this post is to be taken as "Ha, ha, only serious". If you want more thoughts on the same line, see here.
spanish and catalan, too.
I thought that the post was terrifically funny. I don't have any mod points, so I can't give you any. I can do something for you though. Since Slashdot is a zero sum game, my loss is your gain! I've got over 200 karma, and this message congratulating you should surely be modded down. You get your reward one way or another...
Oops, you're an AC. Drat.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
4.9 billion years hence, assuming that only cockroaches and lawyers for the MPAA exist, what kind of legacy are we leaving for the inhabitants of a new star with new life, billions of light years away. With a plethora of PCs running their version of seti@home, what chance do they have of picking up our civilisation.
:-)
Practically none when you think about it.
By that time, encryption will be so advanced it'd take a billion years to develop the hardware and probably another billion to crack the zillion-bit encryption code used to ensure we all have to pay lots of samolens for our classic "Simpsons". Laws will be passed to shield monitors and television sets to prevent old-fashioned analogue interception of what is considered the property of the movie studios. In other words, if aliens do pick up anythign, it would be so unintelligible that it makes no difference from the randomness of background noise in space.
Even today, with power levels going down and down, smaller sattelite dishes and (relatively) simple compression, we are slowly but surely destroying any chance of aliens detecting us. A decade ago, it would be conceivable for someone to constuct from scratch the apparatus to decode a television signal. Now, how would we get past the stage of constructing a viewing card?
I know it's off topic, but it's the closest topic I've seen for a long time to put forward this line of thought
Just some random thoughts off the top of my head before I go to bed tonight... Please don't take it seriously.
Karma makes sense. It makes a lot more sense if you add reincarnation.
Since that is a double star system, the dynamics wont be exactly the same. What is supposedly happening there is a one old star is feeding another one causing a massive jetstream to be blown off of it.
I think a better idea of what the sun might look like in 5 billion years is more likely looking at Betelgeuse (ok its much more massive but the idea is correct.) You are going to see it bloat out,
eat the planets and then possibly there might be an interesting effect where Jupiter will eat up some of the gas from the Sun and possibly become a brown dwarf. This would be a long shot, but more likely at the 8-10 billion stage where the sun is becoming a white dwarf and spewing 50% of its mass off in a "planetary nebula"
-- weee I get to use my Astrophysics degree for the first time in 7 years!!!!
-- SJS smooge at smoogespace dot com
Well, it may not have come to English from Swedish - though a lot of olde english words are old viking toungue -, but "sol" is the Swedish word for "sun".
So now you know.
C'mon people, we know it won't die. The Network Is The Computer. All that high-powered hardware and nifty Java code will outlive everything else in the universe.
Or do you mean that other Sun? (grin)
--
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Is the question really interesting at all? It apparently took a mere 10 million years for a land-based mammal to evolve into whales. In five billion years, humans might even have evolved into energy-based creatures like in Babylon 5. For certain, they will not lokka bit like the humans of today - who don't even look like the humans of a trifle 10,000 years ago.
Does that mean we're due for a nice "nuclear winter" type event? I hope so - I'm ready for snowboarding season to begin here on the East coast! :)
It's saddening, to see what one day may happen to our own star.... Slowly aging and ebbing further away, more and more insignificant as time goes on. I mean, really, the Sun deserves a better ending than just wasting away, doesn't it? Our sun has done such good for us, I think the least we can do is pay it back by ensuring that its end is as spectacular as possible! Who's with me? All right! I'm going out right now and starting the
Obliterate Sol Campaign!
5 billion years from now, there's gonna be a hell of a lightshow!
-Denor
Come on! I'm an American! I don't even care what the earth looks like 5 years from now. All I know is that it's my kid's problem, and they better fix it so they can put me in a good nursing home. I need to go now, there's a bucket of used car oil out front and it isn't dumping itself in the gutter.
The article says that this might involve a red giant star and a white dwarf star, both in their death throes. Last time I look, this planet does not orbit around dual suns. Perhaps, you think that you are still on Tatooine. Get over with it! Your uncle and aunt are gone. The key things is this.
Hubble astronomers believe the object is actually two aging stars masquerading as a single youngster.
Ritchie+Thompson=Torvalds?
Sure, planetary nebulae are pretty and impressive, but that's not what humanity should be worried about, at least as far as our sun goes. Current theories of stellar evolution point out that already, the Sol should have a sizable core of He "ash" that isn't yet hot enough to fuse into higher elements. As this He core grows, the pressure will build under the force of gravity, causing both the core temperature to rise and the sun to shrink. Solar luminosity could increase by a factor of 10% over the next 100 million years.
If this doesn't sound like much, recall that climatologists predict dire consequences of a 1-2 degree greenhouse effect. A 10% increase in solar output would cause much worse heating. However, we humans wouldn't even last that long. The seas regulate greenhouse gasses by locking up carbonates in seabed sediment; increase the temperature (a little) and the rate of deposition increases. Unfortunately, increase solar output by about 5% and this process runs away. Result: no more oxygen in our atmosphere. Or carbon dioxide, for that matter, so the forests won't help then. By the time Sol gets to +10% luminosity, we're talking about oceans at a rolling boil. The atmosphere fills up with water vapour, solar radiation spits this into oxygen and hydrogen (unfortunately the oxygen at this point is too late to do any good) and the hydrogen escapes to space. Poof -- 200 million years and the Earth is as dry as Venus, and possibly as acidic.
Now how's Mars sound?
Quantum mechanics: the dreams that stuff is made of.
Luckily Moore's Law applies to suncreen as well as CPU power with SPF rating doubling every 18 months or so.
By the year 10870 we should have sunscreen capable of SPF 2.6 * e^16, or enough to protect 1/3 of the population of Kentucky from the nasty rash that would develop as our star explodes.
Thank god the dark cold world of the future will contain the pale, personable, people from Kentucky.
Intergalactics - A pretty cool strategy game in a java applet
"Hubble astronomers believe the object is actually two aging stars masquerading as a single youngster."
Last time I checked, we weren't living in a binary star system with a white dwarf compainion. I'd trust Hubble astronomers over ABCNews any day. Just another troll post, it seems.
The subject of this article is the binary star that Hubble saw in the process of leaving the main sequence as its hydrogen runs out. But when this happens to a star, it is not the end of its life.
A star with the mass of the Sun blows off a lot of its material as it goes nova, but eventually the remenants (certainly less than 1/2 the original mass) turn into a white dwarf star. While this type of star isn't undergoing a lot of fusion at its core any more, it takes quite a while for the remaining energy to radiate into space. But eventually, the white dwarf will cool off. You might call the result a black dwarf... but its still there.
This month's (October 2000) Astronomy Magazine (http://www.astronomy.com/) has an article speculating about this very thing: what happens to stars (actually, what happens to the ENTIRE UNIVERSE) after the nuclear fuel runs out. What I got out of this article is that all those burned out stars are going to be around for a very, VERY long time... on the order of 10^40 (10,000 trillion trillion trillion) years. That is how much time it is estimated it will take before proton decay will eventually evaporate everything (except perhaps some black holes).
So all those who were worried that the sun was only good for another 5 billion years, take heart! Except for the fact that none of us will live through its transformation, we would have plenty of time to enjoy our planet's primary.
I've seen a lot of 1st posts. Most are pretty lame. My two favorites is one guy who posted a rambling, but interesting comment. However, he selectively highlighted (bold letters) a sequence of letters that spelled out, well you know. The other was a /. interview with someone. He then posted (wasn't the 1st) something like, "First Post, sorry I couldn't resist". He got moderated up and down. It was very funny as he clearly understood /.
The moderators will probably drop my post down. Fine by me. But they are, as a major US politician stated, "major-league asshole(s)".
Back OT. This involves two dying suns. The Earth orbits one. This may involve one very young sun. The Earth doesn't orbit a very young sun. So what does this have to do with the price of eggs?
I was wondering how they can tell the difference between a new star, and this star (these stars??). The article says it is behaving in the same manner, so how can they tell?
Spectroscopy would be one way. If the star pair is rich in helium or heavy elements and the surrounding nebula isn't, that would indicate that the stars have been burning for quite some time.
Environment is another way. If the star pair is inside a star-forming nebula, then there's a decent chance that it's young. No nebula, and it's probably old.
Structure is another. If it's confirmed that one of the pair is a white dwarf, then it's most likely an old binary system (alternative is a protostar that captured a white dwarf). White dwarf stars are what you get when a star the size of the sun exhausts its fuel (after the red giant stages).
I have no idea which technique of the above, if any, was used for the star pair in question. The article didn't go into much detail.