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."

Comments

Re:They use spectrometry to measure the heat

[LittleBigLui]

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. :)

Re:Measuring temperature at great distance

[!the!bad!fish!]

... no disturbing medium ...
What like this?

Re:50 closest, closest matches to the sun

[Red Rocket]

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. :)