Slashdot Mirror
The Sun Had Sisters
[TheBORG] writes to mention a Space.com article about the Sun's departed solar siblings. Our own medium-sized yellow star was far from alone when it was formed, with hundreds of fellow solar bodies and a supernova to keep it company. From the article: "The evidence for the solar sisters was found in daughters--such as decayed particles from radioactive isotopes of iron--trapped in meteorites, which can be studied as fossil remnants of the early solar system. These daughter species allowed Looney and his colleagues to discern that a supernova with the mass of about 20 suns exploded relatively near the early Sun when it formed 4.6 billion years ago; and where there are supernovas or any massive star, you also see hundreds to thousands of sun-like stars, he said. The cluster of thousands of stars dispersed billions of years ago due to a lack of gravitational pull, Looney said, leaving the sisters 'lost in space' and our Sun looking like an only child ever since, he said."
They were doing the Nutron Dance....woooohooo...
DEAD DEAD DEAD DELETE ME
...but an appropriate name for an astrophysicist.
Pah, evidence. Faith and internal revelation is a much more powerful "way of knowing." Look at me! I'm an epistomologist!
A guy named Looney is trying to tell us the Sun had sisters.
Sigs are for Terrorists.
I bet they were hot!
HA! The sun would have to get up *PRETTY EARLY IN THE MORNING* to catch *ME* out"!!!
Oh wait...
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
So a supernova of 20 suns equivalent managed to explode and leave behind thousands of sun-like stars?
Apparently conservation of mass laws were different back then.
Jeremy
This is pure crap I'm spittin out here, but I suppose anything is possible...
So it's slightly possible that George Lucas wasn't lying and the whole galactic-terran-empire "long-long ago" thing really happened?
In all seriousness though (well, half seriousness), suppose this would mean that Earth IS that bunch of humans huddled around a burning-trash-can of a black-hole?
Let me see if I have this clear now. We are mold forming upon the scum on top of a molten pile of rock swinging around a hot piece of miniscule debris left over from a single speck exploding on the outskirts of a tiny disk floating in a vast space full of other tiny disks and whatnot? And the going theories include one where this vast space is only one of an infinite number of vast spaces?
Put's watching my diet in perpective, that's for certain.
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
'Interplanetary lesbian incest and its place in the formation of our galaxy'
So the claim is that hundreds, maybe thousands, of sun-like stars were in close proximity to each other, but they didn't generate enough gravity to stay in the same neighborhood? How does that make any kind of sense?
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
"The cluster of thousands of stars dispersed billions of years ago due to a lack of gravitational pull, Looney said"
How does that work? These stars are the gravitational pull, local "depressions" in the spacetime fabric that bend space around them towards themselves. Which is gravitational pull. Which must be overcome by some other force, either other gravitational pull from some other, larger/closer mass(es), or momentum from a kinetic event like a collision. Maybe the exploding supernova knocked them out of the area. Maybe, if it was big enough, its departing mass would have not only knocked the stars away, but pulled them away, overcoming their mutual gravitational attraction through greater departing, but still attractive, mass.
But something did. That's the biggest missing factor in this whole proposed scenario, in Robin Lloyd's Space.com story about it at least, that it needs to hold it together. Theories fall apart because of a lack of gravity, star clusters not so much.
--
make install -not war
Pluto is still the bastard stepchild in this sad, sad story.
I quote The cluster of thousands of stars dispersed billions of years ago due to a lack of gravitational pull
Well depending on how close the stars realy where, I see the idea of lack of gravity as kind of dumb. If they where far enough apart that there was not enough gravity to hold them together, then how would you even consider these sibblings to begin with. So lets make a assumption here, there was gravitional forces that would atleast cause some affect on these clusters of stars. Wouldent there be some sort of attraction meaning some collisions or obrits of stars. wouldent there more evidance of some sort of orbit of stars as they circled one another over milions of years from the gravity. But them just splitting up dose not sound that right to me.
A finding like this would lend support to the Nemesis theory. If our sun and any of those sister stars are still in some gravitational cycle, it could help explain the periodic extinctions that seem to occur every 26 million years.
A scientist named Twoney is publishing an article in the Astrophysical Journal proposing that a supernova billions of years ago would have resulted in the presence of only one little lonely star in this sector of the galaxy, with the nearest neighbor over four light-years away. "Imagine what a lonely, cold place our solar system would be had this horrible event happened," said Terry Twoney. "Why, our solar system would be so small that life might be viable on just one planet, and Pluto would be so small and cold there would be debates regarding if it even counted as a planet!"
IANAA, but Earth is not my favorite planet. Personally, my favorite planet is Uranus.
Aren't they Solaris, and Coffee Beans, the N1 Star, and StarSuite, as well as GSun and iSun?
This sig donated to Pater. Long live
Maybe the moon was larger, yet somehow decayed into what it is today.
Have you read my journal today?
Dottas
It's all good.
Sometimes Sun gets the market share and its siblings vanish into obscurity. Or Sun loses marketshare and DOS or Windows become the star of the show and Sun fades into obscurity. Nothing new. Happens all the time.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
...personally always wanted a brother, maybe the sun did too.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathetic_fallacy
Grabs his hair and runs screaming from the room.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
Aye, but where's the supernova remnant itself? The rapidly-rotating neutron star with the nasty high-energy pulsar radiation? It was at the center of the explosion, so it had an initial kinetic energy of nearly zero. It should still be in the stellar neighborhood.
Unless the argument here is that the Sun itself was blown away from the site of the supernova...
of a Galactic Porno? I mean, the thing exploded all over the Sun and her Sisters... No wonder they ran away.
Cliff Claven
K.E.G. Party Chairman
Founding Leader of: Koncerned for Egalitarin Governance
I wonder if this would correct that sort of error. Not that I thought about it much it just floated through my mind.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
If there used to be more suns in the sky, you'd think it would have been mentioned in the bible. Hmmm . . . ?
This was initially reported by The Posies in 1993:C ldLDjmSWlI&sid=makgy34GX8I
http://www.google.com/musics?lid=AdqZmDxAS1H&aid=
Not to nit pick, he says with a sly smile, but nothing, 'by virtue of not being a thing' cannot move, regardless.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
Star stuff indeed.
I'm working on covering this for the Museum of Science, Boston on our podcast. I tracked down a PDF of the actual paper, if anyone is interested.
Why is it that people who can't comprehend second and third order differential equations can still catch a ball? Something even my dog can do.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
SUPER hot...
reminds me of this old chinese story
r y/blyrh11051999.htm
http://chineseculture.about.com/library/extra/sto
that means that it has a whole crap load of sister-in-laws. Based on my experience, that means that the Moon had to give at least one of them a room in it's house after it's boyfriend threw it out. It then had to feed the beast and pay for it's divorce from the previous no good boyfriend/husband. Finally, the moon had to put its foot down and throw the sister-in-law out before the whole solar system went bankrupt.
(posting anonymously to protect the guilty)
That's "Interstellar Incest", you Insensitive Clod!
My other body is also not wearing any.
No kidding? That's amazing. I would never have imagined that. So the explosion involves some kind of jetting effect that sends the remnant off with a high velocity? That's wild.
I'd like to make the point that this scenario is what we expected from observing other stars and clusters.
Stars start forming when giant molecular clouds are compressed, typically by the mass density wave of a spiral arm. This creates a star-forming region, where many thousands of stars will be formed in close proximity. Because the gas is able to efficiently shed kinetic energy (transforming it into heat), the stars have low velocities relative to each other, so are gravitationally bound in an "open cluster". (The Pleiades cluster is a spectacular nearby example.)
Stars of many sizes (masses) are formed, and the high mass ones very quickly run through their lives and explode as supernovae, while the stars are still in a cluster. (The lifetime of a star has roughly an inverse-cube relationship to its mass.)
Over a period of tens of millions to billions of years, the cluster is broken up. (How long it takes depends on its location in the galaxy and how tightly bound it was initially.) I think that tidal effects from passing molecular clouds and spiral arm waves are mostly responsible for this, but it is long enough since I've studied this that I could be mistaken. By now, the sun's sisters are probably distributed uniformly in a ring around the centre of the galaxy. The supernova remnants are long, long gone.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
thankyou, thankyou, I'll be here all week
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
Thanks for the pointer.
A couple of more serious questions:
Surely if a supernova was that close it would be the event that started the formation of the sun, rather than happening after its formation.
What's the effect of the outgassing (explosion) on the proper motion of the created stars? What percentage escape the gravitational field of the embedded neutron star?
Squirrel!
shouldn't he be studying moons instead of stars?
I am know expert but aren't all the element cook up in stars and then disperse by either solar wind or supernovae. We have a pretty good selection of elements here on earth. So much much so that we were able to identify 92 natural elements. 36 of which can only be formed in the explosion of a supernova. Isn't likely that those elements were formed in nearby stars with a close proximity to our sun given the fact that inverse square relationship to particles dispersion and our solar system has rocky planets. Since we apparently have a good supply uranium, our sun would have be near a supernova early in life. This doesn't seem like news because the lone nebula theory would seem unlikely because it would have accounting for all the heavy element material that made up the planets. All I really wonder is there a black hole nearby in our galactic neighborhood?
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
I'm confused. Were this SparcStations?
MjM
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen