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Three Largest Stars Identified
mOoZik writes "BBC News is reporting that astronomers have identified the three biggest stars known to science, having diameters of more than 1.5 billion km. If they were located in the same place as our own Sun - at the centre of the Solar System - the stars would stretch out further than the orbit of Jupiter!"
Eat your hearts out. :) It awes one to think any single object could be so bloody large!
There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
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- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
Why wouldn't these huge starts turn into black holes?
Selling software wont make you money, selling a service will.
The mass of these stars must be outrageous. Could it be possible that they are already black holes that we are able to see only because we are already within the event horizon of the stars' gravitational pulls?
It wouldn't stretch out to uranus.
Go.
I feel really insignificant now. Not even a *large* electron do we live upon... it's really tiny!
And I thought the Sun was the only star in the solar system.
That's really, really big man.
Rocko.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
Isn't that simply 1.5 Tm?
Is that at least one giant goes supernova in my lifetime. I don't think that's too much to ask
:wq
Don't be so ethnocentric. There are such things as trinary systems.
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Anyone heard ahything that way?
I've heard anything from tomorrow afternoon to 2 milion years. I've heard it's been getting increasingly variable since 1940.
If it goes supernova (and it's WAY big enough) what would be the results here? Genetic disorders? Extinction? Has anyone done the math on this?
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
KW johnholmesitarii (9,800 light-years away), V354 ronjeremycephei (9,000 light-years away), and KY lexingtonsteelcygni (5,200 light-years away).
we're ripping up the neighborhood!
It would be interesting to find the largest non-red giant stars. As once our own sun turns into a red giant, it's radius is supposed to extend out past Jupiter as well.
If you have a supersized star, would you have big planets? I think the largest extrasolar gas planet is four or five times larger than Jupiter.
Yo Mamma's so fat...
-ubuntu others as you would have others ubuntu you.
The scientists credited with the discovery was seen singing "I like big stars and I cannot lie" the following day at a Mall by area man Jeff Willcot.
Willcot, who works as a plumber, said to journalists in a press conference "He things he's such a freaking bitshot now that he got all the press about the stars, but when his sink was clogged with hair - he calls me"
The scientist was unavailable for comment.
This puppy would actually eclipse Saturn, whose mean orbit is about 1.43 billion km.
In Soviet Russia, all our base are belong to you!
*GASP*, Marlon Brando's back!
Don't worry about it. These giants are big, but not necessarily massive enough to go supernova at the end of their lives.
Besides, hypothetically, even if it were to explode like a supernova, it won't affect us much. Here is the number:
d = distance to the closest giant (5200light-yr)
E = total energy arising from supernova (1e51erg or something like that)
The energy receied at the Earth is
E / (4 *pi *d*d).
Now compare this number with the energy we receive every second from the Sun:
E_sun / (4 * pi * r*r)
where r is the distance between the Earth and the Sun (1.5e13 cm). You do the math, then the ratio of these two quantities comes out to be:
[E/(4*pi*d*d)] / [E_sun/(4*pi*r*r)] ~ 2.4
So all we get from this supernova is about 2 seconds worth of energy received from the Sun. And I'll tell you that the actual energy received from the supernova is much, much smaller.
please, the old goatse-jokes aren't funny anymore.
... and the astronomers name it the Beowulf Cluster.
The blurb is copied directly from the BBC article, so send them a letter to inform of their grammatical inadequacy. :)
A blog like any other.
what an appropriate user name for this post.
for a minute there, i lost myself...
God must have been on crack the day he created those stars...
Biggest?
Are we talking about diameter, magnitude or mass?
My guess, from reading the article, is diameter. I'd be interested in the highest mass stars, since there is an inverse relationship between mass and lifetime. What's the shortest time that a star can exist for?
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Now that's a spicey-ah meatball!
...my goal is to blow up one giant in my lifetime. Right after I finish this time machine, now where is that damn flux capacitator again...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
What's protecting innocents from SpamVampire in the event of a joe-job?
Astrophysicists used to think that a supernova occured once in the Milky Way (on average) every 100-300 years, but there was some work done in the early 90s that indicated it was more like once every 30 years or so.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
...makes such big good-for-nothing stars?!
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't red giants dencity pretty low? So when a star transforms into a red giant, it's bound to get much larger. So wouldn't it be cooler to find actually non-dying star of this magnitude?
(Well definetly not cooler)
Shows what little they know. If they were located in the same place as our own Sun, Jupiter would burn up and not have an orbit!
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
SO666, or perhaps Rosie O'Donnell for short
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Several other posts have danced around the question a little bit, without answering it directly. It's a good question.
While these stars are big, filling a large volume of space, the article doesn't mention their mass. This is the ultimate determinant of what becomes a black hole and what doesn't.
Stars have gravity trying to pull everything into the center off it's mass. In physics pressure is basically equal to temapture, so as all the mass is squezed together, it heats up and begins nuclear fission. This creates a lot of heat, and the star's mass tries to expand. Gravity and pressure find a happy meidum and that is how the star ends up a particular size.
As the star burns it's fuel, it has to get hotter or it will stop 'burning', due to the way nuclear fusion works. Eventually it will burn up its fuel and prssure will not balance gravity, and the whole star will collapse. If it is really heavy, say several times the mass of the sun, it will probably collapse into a black hole. If it is slightly heavier than our sun, it might end up as a very dense neutron star. Otherwise, it will end up as a white dwarf, a small star that is somewhat like a ember left over after a campfire. If a star is really massive it can also explode in a supernova to lose some weight and avoid becomming a black whole.
As I mentioned, the article doesn't say what the mass of the star is, but it's probably a safe bet that is above the black hole limit. When it finishes burining its fuel, it will likely go supernova and/or become a black hole.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these
That's no moon...
;/
oh crap, wrong article...
Not the guy who forwarded it to Slashdot's fault; the BBC got it wrong. According to the Lowell Observatory's site, it's 7 au in radius, or about 1.3 billion MILES. That's B-I-G.
And dang, you'd expect the BBC to keep their units right.
thats 932 056 788 miles
My pics.
say bout... 2Gs?
"what an appropriate user name for this post."
What an appropriate sig for an ass. Slashdot is not for pyramid marketing.
The largest objects in universe are hot plasma in clusters of galaxies
http://content.aip.org/PHPAEN/v10/i5/1992_1.html/
If we were within the event horizon, then everything between us and it would be within the event horizon. Nothing within the event horizon can escape, ie, move further away from the black hole. The fact that we can see it, means that light is moving further away from it (and reaching us), therefore, cannot be within the event horizon. If the light leaving it is not within the event horizon, stands to reason, that we are not either. blip.
You know, I really used to idolize the space program. Typical little boy, big dreams of flashy job. It was more than that, it was the flying too, something I enjoy even today. And admittedly there has been a lot of good come from the space program (albeit for the wrong reasons) and more than likely a fair share of nasty things came from that research that the government never bothered to tell us about. To be perfectly honest, though, I can't really think of any new or important advancements that have come out of the space program lately. Never have I been a proponent of ignorance, but I really gotta ask, who really cares? I'm sure that we're making marvelous and wonderful new telescopes, but we're using the same shuttles now that we were 20 years ago, and we're not even sure those are really safe anymore. There hasn't been any benefits to pertinent sciences, and the images we're getting from telescopes aren't producing much more than pretty pictures and more unproven theories. I'm not sleeping any better knowing that the biggest star we've found so far is bigger than half our solar system, or I'd never have time to read slashdot. It's sad when I would feel the urge to take the axe to one of my childhood dreams, but I think the space program in general has simply outgrown it's usefulness. America keeps funelling money into it but nothing's really coming out, at least not that we know of. If they could put half the effort and ingenuity that has gone into the space program to say...medical research, cleaner energy sources, environmental repair, agriculture, housing, any number of other areas, or (egad) the national debt, I think we would be utilizing those resources in a much wiser fashion. Don't even try to bring up the possibility of colonizing Mars. I myself have even thought of ways to try to make it feasible but there are some problems with it. 1. To say that it is a 'long term possibility' would at the least say that it's not anything that any of us are going to see. Probably not our grandkids. 2. Because of point 1, we're probably going to destroy ourselves long before that. 3. Even if it is, and we can't cut it on this planet, what gives us the right to destroy a another one? 4. Every scifi I've ever seen where we colonized Mars, it breaks away and we have a horrible civil war that in most cases we never reconcile from. I know that this may seem like a stretch but knowing our history may keep us from being damned to repeat it, my study of it shows that we're still pretty likely to repeat it. Besides, the difference between Scifi and fanasy is that scifi is possible. Enough people have thought about it, maybe the authors are right.
Please be kind, I am new to this.
Case in point: Calista Flockhart.
When will the artists rendition competition begin for what it looks like on the surface? Should be able to see Saturn on the horizon, since it only goes out to Jupiter's orbit.
Remember, we're limiting the question only to the milky way. The Milky Way galaxy is basically a sphere (diameter of 50,000? light years) surrounded by a disc with diameter of 100,000 light years. The earth is about 1/2 of the distance from the outer edge to the core. That means that the most distant part (from earth) is the other edge of the disc. This means it would take you 3/4 * 100,000 = 75,000 years to see the most distant suprnovas.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
"1.5 billion km across" means nothing to me. How many Libraries of Congress could the star hold?
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imagine earth that size.
plenty resources, more than enough land, so no reason to fight over that and the internet spanning earth would be BIGGGGGG
Privacy is terrorism.
Attention people!!! New rules for everybody !! Large doesn't mean heavy. Large blue objects are heavy. Large red objects are not heavy. Any questions? Dismissed!
red giants tend to burn at lower temperatures because they have scant usable fuel left, so it would technically be cooler to find one of these guys than a younger star with the same radius.
When I was soldering my leads to the stereo using a propane torch, the copper turned the flame green.
:->
Want a nice color change in the hearth?
Put a copper tube drilled with holes and stuffed with rubber hose into the fire.
I imagine there might be conditions similar in not so common sequences of stars; perhaps containing the right recipe of elements?
No doubt some stellar race has already toyed with the idea.
So maybe there would be purple plants under a Green Star?
If I was one of those stars, I'd be watching out... it wouldn't surprise me if the RIAA came after them...
If they were located in the same place as our own Sun - at the centre of the Solar System...
So that's where I left it!
Now that's what i call energy. It's a pity we couldn't utilise it.
Its all just smoke and mirrors.
;
I'm sure there may not be many anomalies between us and 9800ly, however, it would be smart to keep an open mind about the possibility.
Sounds like they are making some progress
"With close stars, scientists can calculate stellar sizes from their temperatures and luminosities."
So does this formula not work for distances beyond say 1,000,000ly?
Where is the transition and why?
01/14/04 Blog 4: -- You Are Here -- SpaceCanada.org
The article appears to be speaking about diameter.
If you're keen to find out about stars with the largest mass, you could start with Eta Carinae. It's extremely massive and unstable, and came to everyone's attention when it was noticed to be rapidly fluctuating in brightness over the past hundred or so years. It's also close enough that there's arguably a theoretical possibility that we could be in danger if it decides to go any time soon, although it's probably not worth worrying about. Not from any explosion, of course, but if it were to fire gamma rays in our direction then we might have problems, for instance.
I'm not sure what the word is now, but at one point in recent history the mass of Eta Carinae had been empirically measured to be more than what had been considered theoretically possible. In any case, it's very close to the boundary of the most massive that a star could possibly be without collapsing in some way.
As a somehow related side note, eta-carinae also happens to be what I decided to name my Dell Inspiron when I set it up a few months ago.
This attitude has been forwarded by the incorrect for thousands of years.
I say if your theory doesn't match observation, then maybe it's your theory that has the problem. But scientists ( particularly those working on string theory ) seem to get it around the wrong way, and either make small additions to a fundamentally wrong theory, or simply state outright that their theory is 100%, and it's everybody else's eyes that have the problem.
Now I'm not saying that this guy in particular is wrong. I don't know enough about this particular topic to say either way. But I recognise the war cry of the incorrect when I hear it. Possibly a coincidence in this case?
"Red supergiants are massive stars nearing the ends of their lifetimes. They are comparatively cool, luminous and very large." So when they use up their fuel, won't its own gravity cause it to collapse creating a black hole?!
I'd like to submit Star Jones. She's HUGE! Sorry, got a big caught up in the excitement.
Bollocks. "Farther" is a specific variant of "further". It can be used instead of further in distance comparisons but doesn't have to be.
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
I hereby declare that "the orbit of Jupiter," much like the popular trend of referencing an arbitrary number of Volkswagons as a benchmark for indicating "pretty heavy", is becoming a new unit of measure indicating "pretty far away".
You heard it here first.
As far as I know.
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According to the image in the article, these starts are so heavy that they are flattened by their weight. Or are they rotating so fast that they are stretched? Seriously, I have no idea why the artist decided to draw the stars as ellipses as opposed to circles. Does anyone have any idea?
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KY Cyg could do with some KY Jelly to avoid ring burn.
distance jupiter-sun: 778.300.000
distance other side sphere: PI * r
3.14 * 778.300.000 = 2.476.517.488 km
speed concorde: about mach2 = about 2.000 Km/h
2.476.517.488 / 2.000 = 1238258 hours
1238258 / 24 = 51594 days
51594 / 365 = 141 years
hmmmmmmm.
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Bart: Wow, the universe is so boring.
Thanks for the laugh :)
(This is one of the reasons I read with Flamebait +6.)
For talking about stars that are so far away, shouldn't we be talking about what they were like, as opposed to what they are like today (since we can't know that?)
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Indeed, those are big stars.
Must be the biggest in the world by my reckoning.
What about fumes from the melting/burning rubber?
--
Promoting critical thinking since 1994.
Red supergiants may be large, but their density have been described by e.g. Larry Niven as "red-hot vacuum." At least their outer layers are very tenuous at best. Given that the masses are typically only a few orders of magnitude more than the Sun, at most, but that their volumes are enormously much bigger, there can't be that
This means (surface) gravity is low and they can get by with less hydrostatic pressure to maintain their bulk.
The *core* is typically very dense, much denser than the Sun. Higher pressures are needed to support fusion of higher-order elements. Makes the surface layers even less dense, since a lot of the mass is still in the core.
If they were located in the same place as our own Sun - at the centre of the Solar System - the stars would stretch out further than the orbit of Jupiter!
Wait a minute... the Earth's not the center of the Solar System???
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
The right unit is: (pick one)
1/Furlongs
2/Light-Fortnight
What about fumes from the melting/burning rubber?
That's what makes you see the colors - duh!
Q: After Oprah's stellar expansion and contraction, what kind of star is left?
A: A brown dwarf.
with plenty of resources, I bet they would have a ton of oil, gold, etc. for mining and shipping back to Earth. Of course we'd need some sort of teleportation device to do so cost effectively, but you get my drift.
Man, those metric users just refuse to use the correct units for a given application... USE LIGHT YEARS!
You might as well have said: "over 700 million miles"
Kilometers!? Indeed!
Your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
If they were located in the same place as our own Sun - at the centre of the Solar System...
Where are all the fundies whining about the concept of a heliocentric uh... solar system? You know, "IT'S JUST A THEORY!" and all that bible-thumping nonsense? You're making yourselves look bad by not being consistently nutty. Those nasty LIBRULS are teaching YOUR CHILDREN the earth orbits (that means "goes around", btw) the sun! Where's the outrage?
It depends in which form this energy arrives.
The energy of one keypress in X-rays is enough to kill you.
Where the hell else would they be??? Orbiting a planet?
Is the Beeb going back to believing that suns orbit planets? What's next, the Flat Earth Society, or the "The Moon is a CIA Spy Balloon" theory?
What worries me more is that there are people who read that and thought "Oh, so THAT'S where the sun is!"
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
Supernovae are quite faint in X-rays (until their blast waves hit circum/inter-stellar material).
Not all of the energy emerge in the form of light, either.
it would finally be a nice day out by Uranis...hehe
That's very borderline true....
Keys on a keyboard draw maybe a watt when in use. At most. Assuming a keystroke takes about a tenth of a second, you're sucking down 0.1 joules per keystroke.
Delivered to your entire body, that's about 2 milligray (0.2 rad) of absorbed dose. A fatal dose is upwards of 5 gray (500 rad).
To be fair, if you instantaneously delivered that dose to a small volume--10 mL, or a third of an ounce--then you'd hit that with 10 gray and kill most of it. (Assuming it was a reasonably sensitive spot.) If you delivered it right to the spinal cord in the neck, you might be able to kill someone. Frankly, that amount of energy, delivered just about anywhere, might annoy someone--but it won't kill them.
~Idarubicin
Will one ever stretch further than Uranus?
No goatse pics, please
-- Boycott Shell
Some chemical reaction takes place where you don't really smell any burning rubber.
Its consumed.
I just started Celestia to visit them, but I can't find them.. stm
According to http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4164365
they are called
KW Sagitarii
V354 Cephei
KY Cygni
but they are not in the celestia catalog.
But the catalog uses at least two different naming conventions for stars, so I'm (or the webpage, or celestia) probably using the wrong names.
Can anybody help me?
Greetings
Sven
My shrink told me that "size does not matter" ......
Or was it anti-matter
Hans
Play beer! Please tell me that some other people on /. watch sports and have seen those commercials. Please.
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From MSNBC:
"Despite their tremendous diameters, the stars are not the most massive in the universe, said MIT undergraduate student Emily Levesque, who presented the findings. At just 25 solar masses, these red supergiants would look like wimps in a weigh-in against stars that can be up to 150 times the mass of the sun."
haven't finished reading all these threads, so maybe this is redundant, but i think that makes it pretty clear.
there's a more in-depth article at science.com as well - good site.
The stars and the sky that we see currently do not represent the real state of the universe at this point in time, do they (since light can take a very long time indeed to arrive to our eyes)?
...
Things could be very different in some places than what we're perceiving them to be