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Astronomers Find Sun's Twin
mroch writes "Space.com is reporting that astronomers may have found a solar twin -- a star almost exactly like our own Sun. Interesting tidbits from the article include: "The star, 18 Scorpii, sits about 47.5 light-years away in the constellation Scorpio, and has long-been suspected of being Sun-like. [...] The star burns slightly hotter than the Sun, at 5,789 degrees Kelvin compared to 5,777 degrees. It appears to rotate slightly faster than the Sun, taking 23 days to complete a rotation rather than the Sun's 25." It boggles my mind to think that we can measure temperature that exactly from 279,000,000,000,000 miles away, and that they are complaining over a 12-degree difference."
Yeah, there's much difference between a delta of 12 degrees kelvin and 12 degrees celcius. OTOH, you USians (and UKians?) with your funny measurements probably measure temperatures in ounces, feet or hands or something. :)
Free as in mason.
Does this have to be off-topic? How about that planet in Star Trek that was just like Earth, but it was run by Nazis.
They determine the temperature of a star, based on the light it gives off? That is bogus. What if something in between the star and Earth is changing the wavelength of the light? I can shine a light-bulb through a green sheet of plastic, and change it, but the temperature of the bulb doesn't change.
Really, you shouldn't use the word 'degree' with the work 'Kelvin' as in the case used in the Story. It's preferable to write simply 5789 Kelvin.
Since we're nitpicking... its kelvin, not Kelvin.
You'd be far more authoritative if you knew how to spell Celsius.
... no disturbing medium ...
What like this?
Kids today are tyrants. They contradict their parent, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers. - Socrates 400 BC
Measuring the temperature of a star is no problem, no matter how long the distance. All you need to do is compare the number of Linux users to the number of Windows users. If the solar system has more Windows users, the star is naturally going to produce more heat due to the pent up frustrations of end-users caused by Windows crashing on a daily basis. Our own Star is only a mere 12 degrees cooler because of the growing number of Linux users to have alleviated themselves of Windows Hell.
... and in the DRM, bind them.
What I want to know is would it be possible to fly backwards around the sun faster than the speed of light and travel back in time?
Linux: The world's best text-adventure game.
Binary geeks can count to 1,023 on their fingers
Lots of people do this. Just the other day, a guy in traffic showed me the how he could convert the decimal number 4 into binary.
- Hail to our fearless misleader! Fool speed ahead!
I think it's going to turn out that what we call our sun is actually the twin, and that other star is the real sun.