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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!"
Why wouldn't these huge starts turn into black holes?
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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
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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.
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)
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.
My memory is sketchy (dammit Jim, I'm a computer scientist, not an astrophysicist), but: there was a theory floating around a while back that the *universe* was actually inside a supermassive black hole (ie: we're inside one now, but we have no way of detecting this).
It would have been a neat solution to some of the problems that the big bang / big crunch theory raised (ie: where does the matter go inside a black hole - it spawns a bubble of space and a universe inside itself).