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Non-Spherical Stars
An anonymous reader writes "Now that the large interferometers are coming on line, the stars are no longer dots. Achernar (Alpha Eridani), is a huge ellipsoid whose polar radius (due to fast spinning) is 50% smaller than the equatorial one!"
More details at the press release:
1 4-03.html
http://www.eso.org/outreach/press-rel/pr-2003/pr-
Including more technical drawings.
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
50% smaller? Wow, this must be spinning incredibly fast. With so must mass being displaced from where it would be in a sphere, it must effect the pressure inside the star. As such, i wonder how much this effects the fusion within the star. Since fusion is driven by the compressional forces of the suns mass, the effective reduced mass must reduce the energy output of this star. RIght?
Perhps i don't really kow what i am talking about.
You know when you take your index finger and thumb and look at something pretty far away. Then you squish them till they touch.
I think someone was doing that at the end of the telescope.
Norris/Palin 2012
Fact: We deserve leaders who can kick your ass and field dress your carcass.
The oblateness of Altair was measured using the Palomar Testbed Interferometer (PTI) in 1999-2000.
I really don't think the fact that the star isn't a perfect sphere is surprising. The fact that we can measure it is a breakthrough. If we look at the sun, we can see that isn't a perfect sphere. It's not very much an ellipsoid either, but you could imagine a star (much younger) that spins very fast and is more like an ellipsoid. Even Jupiter (and also the earth!) are somewhat flattened.
This site describes the telescopes that comprise the interferometer used to make the observations:
http://www.eso.org/projects/vlti/
Quote:
The Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) consists in the coherent combination of the four VLT Unit Telescopes and of several moveable 1.8m Auxiliary Telescopes. Once fully operational, the VLTI will provide both a high sensitivity as well as milli-arcsec angular resolution provided by baselines of up to 200m length.
I believe a star has zero tensile strength* (it's just a fluid), so once you're spinning too fast for gravity to hold you together, it's bye-bye time.
The better question is this: how did that star form? If it was spinning too fast to hold together, how did it accrete matter with that much angular momentum at all?
* Barring magnetic fields, mind you. But you'd need an ass-kicking field to hold a star together very long, I would think.
This exchange is about on par with "How is a liquid not a fluid?" "Because it's a liquid."
"Fluid" is not a state of matter, no one's claiming it's a state of matter, saying plasma can't be a fluid because plasma is the 4th state of matter is a category error. Liquid is the second state of matter. Gas is the third state of matter. Both are fluids.
A fluid is any substance which undergoes continuous deformation when subjected to a shear stress. The problem we're probably having is that the obvious sources for the shear stresses in the couse of, say, water being poured from a cup (normal force of the side of the cup vs gravity) are paralleled for the case of plasma by electromagnetic feilds. It just don't grok intuitively but, plasma behaves like a fluid... ergo, it is a fluid.
Simple Machines in Higher Dimensions