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NASA Finds Star With a Tail
Andrew Stellman writes "NASA astronomers held a press conference announcing that a new ultraviolet mosaic from NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer shows a speeding star named Mira that's leaving an enormous trail of "seeds" for new solar systems. Mira is traveling faster than a speeding bullet, and has a tail that's 13 light-years long and over 30,000 years old. The website has images and a replay of the teleconference."
Name this star Kirk.
So, when does it hit Earth? Have they made the movie yet?
--Welcome to the Realm of the Hawke--
They describe it as traveling at "supersonic" speeds when they should know there is no sound in the vacuum of space.
They should tell us how many parsecs it could do the Kessel run in.
What a terrible headline and linked article. Mira is a famous red supergiant, the "name-star" of the Mira-class variables. Mira is one of the largest known stars and has been known to astronomers for at least 400 years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mira
Pin the tail on the Mira
Bite my shiny metal ass.
Only if it wanted to drop seeds on it's sister star.
Nasa finds star with a tail...on their website archives!
Newsflash: Our own Sun's velocity is 217 km/s (relative to the galactic center) and 20 km/s relative to the average speed of neighboring stars.
For comparison, a "speeding bullet" slugs anywhere from around 1km/s (sniper rifle) to ~100m/s (short-barrel pistol).
In addition, Wikipedia states that Mira's velocity is 63.8km/s -- which is actually slower than our own's sun (which has no "tail"), leading to two conclusions: (1) Mira's tail is caused by some other factor than it's velocity alone, and (2) Mira's speed is also so faster than a "speeding bullet" beyond comparison. In other words, the comparison is not just off-scale but also irrelevant.
If you insist on using laymen's "cool-sounding" metaphors to describe scientific phenomena, at least check your facts and context, or you will just make a moron out of yourself.
More powerful than a locomotive? Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound?
Look! Up in the sky!
Mutant!
Headline may be terrible, but metaphore "Mira is traveling faster than a speeding bullet" is so good that it saves the whole article. It's like saying "motorcyclist was driving faster than a snail!"
Is this the best they can come up with to distract us from the fact that the world economy is about to colapse around us?
Anyway I'm heading to the bank to arrange another overdraft then some more credit cards.
SPEND, SPEND, SPEND, CONSUMER!
Tor like oatmeals!
It's called panspermia douchebag.
Who immediately thought of Jiminy Cricket?
Don't be a dipshit. The story isn't about discovering the star, it's about the tail that shows up in UV. Troll.
[sarcasm] PFFFT!!..Everyone knows this is impossible, how can a star have a tail 30,000 light years in length when the whole of the Universe is only 10,000 years old [/sarcasm]
That's funny. I just looked Mira up on Stellarium, and no matter how far I zoomed in, I couldn't find any trace of a tail at all.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Mira is traveling faster than a speeding bullet, relative to what object?
Banu
The NASA story makes no mention of the fact that this is star is well-known. All they needed to do was say "tail discovered trailing the well-known star Mira".
(In any case, rather be a dipshit or even a troll than AC. Fucktard.)
Reminds me of this Benford story. Call it the Bullet!
Read the article, bottom of the page: "Mira's tail is only visible in ultraviolet light, and does not show up in visible light."
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
They should tell us how many parsecs it could do the Kessel run in.
A parsec is a measure of distance... and the Kessel Run is a measure of distance (18 parsecs). So we're measuring how far we can travel in... a given distance?
I don't even want to think about the equations required to move in 3D^2 space. Must be some kind of wormhole involved in there somewhere.
Thanks to Special Relativity the speed of light serves as a conversion factor between distance and time. So parsecs can measure time.
SRSLY.
heh, I can do the kessel run in about 7 parsecs.
because it is moving so slowly.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Actually, the Kessel Run is through hyperspace. One might imagine that different hyperspace engines would convert the actual distance into relatively smaller transit distances depending on their capability. Therefore, the Millennium Falcon, being a particularly 'fast' ship, had a hyperdrive that made the Kessel Run particularly short (i.e. it took a shorter path through hyperspace than other ships.) If you can assume that all ships travel through hyperspace at the same rate of speed in that dimension, then Han's statement makes sense.
Whether you believe the writers thought this when they wrote it is another issue altogether.
A parsec is a measure of distance... and the Kessel Run is a measure of distance (18 parsecs). So we're measuring how far we can travel in... a given distance?
I don't even want to think about the equations required to move in 3D^2 space. Must be some kind of wormhole involved in there somewhere.
Correction - 4D^2 space. We still include time where or not we're measuring it. Good luck sleeping tonight!
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
...universe
/. article comment...3 &cid=20229845
from another recent
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=26956
who has the longest tail of all?
Hope is the currency of fools
troll? it's a true story that happened to Hemos a few years ago.
than our own's sun (which has no "tail")
Of course our sun has a tail. It's moving and ejecting matter. It has to have a tail.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
run linux?
Pseudo-comet star, that is what you are
Flying at supersonic speeds
Though sound cannot propagate through a vacuum
Tail lightyears long through outer space
We know TFA will get the science wrong uh huh
And the dupe will posted in a week uh huh
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
I'm not saying it is at all; but couldn't this be some sort of large, slow-moving comet with the fusion characteristics of a star? It could happen. The universe is a large place.
The game.
Relax, I just edited the article on ballistics; now projectiles are fast enough so that these stars are in the ballpark as far as their velocities go.
Hmm, I guess I better edit the article on stadiums so that they can accommodate solar-massed objects while I'm at it.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
You sure this is not the Painkiller?
I understand the speeding bullet thing, but could someone please explain the tail length to me in terms of football fields? I'm having trouble visualising it.
Catch a falling star, and put it in your pocket, and your pants will catch on fire...
I usually choke when journalists do a bad job presenting science. Sometimes the tables get turned, and they quote exactly what's said. Unfortunately. So, in the spirit of equal chain jerking:
From TFA as presented on MSNBC: "If Neanderthal man had ultraviolet eyes and could look above the atmosphere, he could have seen the beginning of this tail forming," study leader Chris Martin, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology, said during a teleconference Wednesday.
AWEsome, d00d.
And, if they had ultraviolet eyes on 30,000 light year long eye stalks, they could not only see
above the atmosphere, they could see the tail as it formed, RIGHT WHERE IT WAS HAPPENING.
OH. OH. And if the DINOSAURS had ultraviolet eyes, and could see above the atmosphere, they could see it 65 million years BEFORE it happened. And they could probably also see that asteroid coming and build SPACESHIPS, no wait, SPACE DINOSAUR MOTORCYCLES, they could get off the planet before it got hit, and fly to that star and live there, and then 65 million years later all wag their tails at the same time and make the star shoot off gas and dust like a BIG TAIL that we could see, because they wanted to say hi and let us know they were all OK and we shouldn't be all sad because we thought they all got extincted.
I guess we can't all be Carl Sagan. Because then there would be BIL..... nevermind.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Wouldn't the tail be formed by some other body's heliosphere? I'm sure there are billions of stars at the center of the galaxy with pretty rapid relative revolutions.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
the kessel run is an area populated by black holes, a ship that moves faster does not have to steer so far around each black hole and can cut closer to each event horizon, allowing a trajectory that is closer to straight and therefore shorter.
Minor correction: it is a red giant, not a red supergiant. Supergiants are very massive stars (on the order of 10 times the mass of the sun or more) which will eventually explode as supernovae. Ordinary red giants are evolved stars of more modest mass. Mira has a current mass of 1.2 solar masses (according to your Wikipedia link) and would have had an original (main sequence) mass of not much more.
It probably has the largest apparent size (angular diameter) of any star except the sun, but it isn't "one of the largest known." For comparison, here is a real red supergiant: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antares. This has about 75% larger radius than Mira.
I believe that Mira was the first star discovered to be variable, hence the name. (Same root as "miracle".)
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
According to the script, they (Lucas) knew it and knew Solo was wrong. From http://www.blueharvest.net/scoops/anh-script.shtm
HAN: Fast ship? You've never heard of the Millennium Falcon?
BEN: Should I have?
HAN: It's the ship that made the Kessel run in less than twelve
parsecs!
Ben reacts to Solo's stupid attempt to impress them with
obvious misinformation.
Emphasis added...
-Trillian
Whether you believe the writers thought this when they wrote it is another issue altogether.
It does make a pretty good "backsplanation", though, you've got to admit.
Kessel Run
But, I wanted socialized health insurance!
It is possible that the Kessel run is not a defined path and Solo is simply refering to the fact that he made it in a shorter distance than most people, perhaps due to obstacles in the way that would cause other people to take a longer but safer route.
They describe it as traveling at "supersonic" speeds when they should know there is no sound in the vacuum of space.
Ya know what they say: In space, no-one can hear you criticize a journalist.
Table-ized A.I.
I personally wanted to know how many Library of Congresses it could pass in an hour.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessel_Run#Kessel_Ru
Exactly, because in space, noone can hear you scream.
Pie Iesu domine, dona eis requiem. [bonk] Pie Iesu domine,... [bonk] ...dona eis requiem.
[bonk]
Pie Iesu domine,...
[bonk] ...dona eis requiem.
Where's the Space Battleship Yamato when you need her? The Comet Empire is coming!
Estoy usandos dos Internet :D
..."travelling at supersonic speed"...
How is the speed of space objects, thousands or possibly millions of light years away determined? Relative to our sun, or some kind of pre-defined center of the galaxy?
Pathfire was bought out by DG Fast Channel in June. It seems they sell servers maybe and services too. It looks like what people call video press releases.
Anyway is this a commercial service only open to news agencies? Anybody know?
It doesn't make any sense, NASA should just dump it all onto a torrent so it can be watched with one of the new torrent film players that advertise open video, like Zudeo or Miro. I spent so much time once upon a time with CU-SeeMe to see NASA live video, and more recently saw interesting science discussions, but they really have very high quality television broadcast quality film they sell. Maybe HD too.
Wouldn't it make more sense, in terms of saving money and making it more accessible, to just host a torrent? Certainly this DG feed is a hose into TV stations where they can patch in some shots if they want some filler, but to degrade NASA into that kind of video press release is just so bizarre! If anyone knows how to get this high quality video I'd like to see it. NASA needs to get with the times.
So, in astronomical terms, it's still moving at snail's pace ?
... yawn
Parent is 100% right.
The first question that immediately struck me about this star's tail is:
The start is going through what? A cloud ? A dark matter thing? A particle wind ?
There is something, otherwise no tail, as for our Sun.
From the article linked to the news:
"This is an utterly new phenomenon to us, and we are still in the process of understanding the physics involved," said co-author Mark Seibert of the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution So, basically they don't know what is pushing the star's matter ?Really the article should have focused on this, it's a shame.
Another linked article states:
Mira's breakneck speed together with its outflow of material are responsible for its unique glowing tail. Images from the Galaxy Evolution Explorer show a large build-up of gas, or bow shock, in front of the star, similar to water piling up in front of a speeding boat. Scientists now know that hot gas in this bow shock mixes with the cooler, hydrogen gas being shed from Mira, causing it to heat up as it swirls back into a turbulent wake. As the hydrogen gas loses energy, it fluoresces with ultraviolet light, which the Galaxy Evolution Explorer can detect. Could someone explain this? It sounds lame to me....You voted, uh, no, don't tell me, I'll guess...uh...OH WAIT! Trick question! You're too young to vote! Good one kid.
But you think George W. Bush is a hottie though, right? Go on, you can tell me, it's okay. At your age it's prefectly normal to feel a little mixed-up.
It also sounds like the Galaxy is trying to defragment. I hope it doesn't corrupt our area. Though then we might finally have a space program worth a fuck. Never mind, sounds great!
rhY
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Where is the Car analogy?
Eclipse PDE and Me
Space is not a complete vacuum; you can in fact have an object travelling at "supersonic" speeds in space. Effectively, what they are really saying (assuming the description is accurate, I haven't RTFA), is that the star is creating a shockwave of space particles (mostly Hydrogen and Helium). Its been 16 months since my Gasdynamics course, but if I recall correctly, these "shockwaves" can have widths on the order of 10s of meters.
Besides, although "supersonically" implies faster-than-sound (and indeed, in most intuitive cases this definition applies), what it is really referring to is travelling faster than speed at which information can propagate in a medium. If you are below this speed, than compression of particles "informs" particles ahead of you in your path of your imminent arrival, and they begin to compress to make room. If you are above this speed, there is no prior knowlege of your arrival and the particles hit a shockwave, "instantaneously" (read: very quickly) accelerating to a velocity that brings them out of your path.
Aikon-
When astronomers first saw the picture, they were shocked because Mira has been studied for over 400 years yet nothing like this has ever been documented before.
and
Because it was the first variable star with a regular period ever discovered, other stars of this type are often referred to as "Miras."
Don't worry if you're a kleptomaniac, you can always take something for it.
Sounds like he is on his way!
I think a much more interesting question is: why is its path (tail) curved? Is it an artifact of imaging, Earth spin, a black hole in the center of the curvature?
-- Sig down
"The More You Know...."
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
Is there any chance of this "speeding bullet" hitting Uranus?
It's a bit silly, but the point is that the star is traveling at a (local) supersonic velocity, while bullets typically travel a bit below the (local) supersonic velocity. People are too hard on scientific journalism; it's bad, but not uniformly so.
The evidence they provide for it traveling at "supersonic" speeds is the evidence of the shock wave accumulating in front of its direction of travel. It is the same shockwave that is created by a supersonic object in the atmosphere. That kind of shock wave - the sonic boom - develops because the object is traveling faster than the sound waves leaving it - the waves all get piled up in a cone extending behind the object. In the case of Mira, the same thing is happening, except that it's waves of stellar material being emitted from the star at some speed, and the star is traveling faster than the propagation of those stellar ejections.
Even without that, barring any literary Star Wars sources as non-cannon, it could still be explained.
:). Little bit of a stretch, but not much.
The "Kessel Run" could be a timed race. Similar to a 0-60 measure. Everybody who does a Kessel Run drives for say, 10 minutes. The further you've gone in that time, the faster the ship you have
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
After reading this post I immediately googled "SPACE DINOSAUR MOTORCYCLES" (and some variants) hoping for a pic... I found a dinosaur next to a motorcycle, and a motorcycle in space, but no dinosaurs on motorcycles in space. *sigh*
i doubt hat i am the first to post this but...
there is a ring around that star. roughly a thousand miles broad, etc. etc. naturally scaled up a bit since it is a red giant. the folk on that ring are using they're own star to escape. what do they know that we don't?
According to the headline, NASA Finds Star With a Tail. Imagine what they could find if they used a telecope!
At the bottom of the
The Kessel run goes past a large black hole. Less powerful ships have to take a detour further around it for fear of being pulled in. The Millenium Falcon is so fast that it can fly much closer to the black hole without being dragged in Futurama-style. So, faster ships can make the run in less distance.
I suggest we all disregard it as a simple error and move on, it's what I try to do.
-absimiliard
While looking at the image of this "Wondering Star", I started to think, "Why such a predictable pattern?" It makes sense that the matter is being left behind because the star is hitting something, (dark matter?), and the resulting reaction is the leaving behind of atoms that will eventually be pulled by relatively nearby stars. What is most interesting, is that this trail is not in the visible, but in the UV bandwidth. In the UV band width, are we looking at the speed of atoms being "drained" off? Could it be that the Star is traveling "Up Stream?", or is it in the way of a "Dark Matter" current?
That is absolutely beautiful. Thirteen light years? What a woman. Jesus, talk about baggage :D
Actually, it is explained in one of the bad sci-fi/soap opera/smut novels of the Star Wars saga. The Kessel run was about smuggling illegal material to a hidden pirate base deep in a nebula. The Millenium falcon was the ship to find the shortest route to the base through the nebula. This is why they said "parsecs". Anyway, maybe Ford bungholed the script, maybe not, but the ghost writers did a good job of making it work.
Mira's velocity is 63.8km/s -- which is actually slower than our own's sun (which has no "tail")
Given that with Hubble we can only see "3 or 4 pixels" worth of Pluto (according to the last episode of Universe on the History channel), how do we know what debris we may or may not be leaving behind our solar system as we move through space?
I come here for the love
In the second-to-last picture, there is a smaller yellow dot that appears to have a UV streamer about 1/6 to 1/8 as long as the UV streamer behind Mira. If that is a second (farther away?) star doing the same thing as Mira, then I wonder ... is there a common point of origin for both?
Mira is traveling faster than a speeding bullet, and has a tail that's 13 light-years long and over 30,000 years old.
Hrrrmmm. OK. So, a light year is about 5,879,000,000,000 miles.
So, 13 light years would be 76,427,000,000,000 miles.
Now divide that by 30,000 years and we get 2,547,566,666.667 miles. now there are 8,760 hours in a year, so if we divide 2,547,566,666.667 by 8,760, we get 290,818.113 miles per hour. Now, that IS fast, especially given the average asteroid skips along at 40,000 mph. But it's not THAT fast - it would take that star an hour to go from here to the moon. If it did it in 5 minutes - yeah, that's fast. But an hour? Heck - our feeble crappy spacecraft get there in a few days...
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
The tail is curved, so this thing is likely in a super large orbit? (Around WHAT?!) Hopefully it can be tracked from here-on.
aside from startrek and starwars analogies... I'm kind of wondering where its comming from and what made it move like this. Usually according to the idea of the big bang theory, stars move uniformly outwards from the point of origin. but what about this star? is it generated by some ancient "other big bang" so there might be more than just one. or did aliens kick their ball of the field into the crowd?
That note to an actor says nothing whether they knew parsecs was a measure of distance or not. All it means was he didn't believe him, not that he was misusing units.
I wrote the news article for Nature. Here it is. It'll be free for only a few days, so grab it while it's hot!
Tom Geller
All the other stars made fun of it in school because it had a tail.
It was explained in one of the books that the planet Kessel (illegal spice production, etc.) was near a group of black holes called the Maw that limited the run to/from the planet to a very few extremely hazardous lanes. The Millenium Falcon was able to make the run in that distance (start of run to end of run) in a short distance because it was fast enough to cut the wash from the black holes.
:)
Mind you, Star Wars is so full of revisionism that all the stuff you "know" has been changed a million times. Like the mitichlorian and the force - this was revised with the explanation that "the don't CAUSE the force, they feed on force strength so the more of them there are, the stronger in the force that individual is" or the great "sith use red lightsabers" revision - wouldn't it suck at Jedi Academy - "What colour's your lightsaber" (building one was one of the tests) "Green", "Blue", "Purple", "Red - awww crap" and then everyone else turns to the unfortunate one and switches on their lightsaber.
Er...
Rational thought is the only true freedom
sure thing I remember that scene http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMcKIOuhIuc/
"The same holds true for Karl Rove."
You're thinking of mirrors.
And, for those who were wondering: that would be ~27809148887081184 1969 Volkswagen buses.
THATS a LOT of hippies!
Opinion:=TMyOpinion.Create(Me);
... into Omikron Spermaceti??
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
That's easy: God created the star together with the tail, 'cause that's his divine plan. Or to test your faith. Or maybe he liked pretty tails.
Don't get me wrong, I'm an atheist myself, but I just can't see anyone's true faith stumbling upon that one. If people can believe that God put dinosaur bones there to test you, why would their mental defenses be shattered by something like this?
And if you think scientific units and measurements put those kinds of beliefs to rest... let's just say that there are those who believe that Noah's Ark was literally that big, and Noah literally picked exactly one pair of each species on Earth, and floated for exactly 40 days. You'd think that stuff like "how much time would he need to include the Kangaroos from Australia and the Jaguars from America and the penguins and..." or "how much did the whole thing weigh, and could that boat float with that much mass aboard" or "so afterwards he went back to put the Kanguroos and Dodos back in Australia?" would test someone's faith big time, but I just haven't seen it happen.
Mind you, I can't as much fault them, because, if I'm allowed to play the devil's advocate for a bit and try to see it through their eyes too:
1. Frankly, if an omnipotent God wanted to create stars with tails or dinosaur bones just for the hell of it, I see no reason why he couldn't. I mean, he's omnipotent, right?
Plus, the "dinosaur bones prove that the Earth must be more than hundreds of millions of years old" argument, can be equally applied to this: "World Of Warcraft has dinosaur bones in Desolace and a few other places, hence World Of Warcraft must be at least hundreds of millions of years old." I mean, phbt, I laugh at those young-Azeroth creationists who insist that WoW is only 3 years old and Blizzard put those dinosaur bones there for decor.
Which, as you did correctly notice, leaves it all boiling down to:
2. God's motives. Frankly, we don't know them. The Bible is very lightweight on details there. Genesis tells you the order that he did it, and, if you want to take it literally, it was enough to say what he wanted there. But it doesn't tell you _why_ he did it. Maybe he was bored, or maybe it was a college assignment, or maybe he was a nerd who just found it fun to create a whole universe, or whatever else, for all we know.
We also know that later he tried several times to impose a moral code on his creation, sometimes as heavyhandedly as nuking Sodom and Gommorah or as the flood. But we don't really know why.
We know that at some later point he wanted to be worshipped alone, but, again, if you think about it, he never says why. It could be that he just thought he'd have an easier time imposing that moral code, or maybe he wanted to stop some of the deviations of other cults (human sacrifice went all the way to burning babies alive in some cults), or just for bragging rights, or maybe (probably) something completely different. There's been a lot of speculation, but essentially we don't know. He just says what he wants, and occasionally threatens or promises rewards to get his point across, but never really bothers explaining why.
The "debunking" the bible by deconstructing God's motives gang, sad to say, usually does a piss-poor job of it. It typically starts by arbitrarily postulating a certain kind of god and a certain kind of motive, typically some version of Terry Pratchett's Small Gods. And then the whole "debunking" is based on that axiom.
The problem, and reason it goes nowhere, is that that's not the kind described in the Bible. Or in any other actual human religion. Basing a debunking of Jehovah (or whatever you want to call him) on what would Om do, is as absurd as debunking it based on what would Odin do, or what would Bush do. If you want to poke holes in someone's belief in the Christian Bible, you have to base that reasoning on the Christian Bible, not (directly or indirectly) on a notion that didn't even exist before 20'th century novels invented it as a plot device.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
blame Klingon fast food
the hand of god?
Facts are useless, they can be used to prove anything.
Your post inspired me - I had to make the image in my head a reality (scroll down slowly): http://www.notentirelystable.com/comic.html
Why do the have to use terms like 'supersonic speed' when writing about a celestial body? There is no atmosphere to gauge the speed of sound, and if they are talking about the speed of sound at one atmosphere, that's only like... what just over 700 MPH? That is not fast for something in space. And regarding speed... didn't these people study Einstein? There is no speed unless you relate it to something else, so what are they relating it to? Here on Earth? Center of the Universe? Heck, maybe it's standing still and we are all moving at the Supersonic Speed of 290,000 MPH.
A +5 funny despite a -1 Overrated, plus an "I like you" which I'm going to take as my first +6 Funny, AND an awesome picture of a SPACE DINO-CYCLE. This has been one nifty thread. Thank you all, especially Chris Martin for the unintentional but still effective inspiration. THIS is what science education should be like.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Did anybody else wonder how the particles deposited 30,000 years ago by the tail continue to emit ultraviolet light? Why wouldn't the hot particles emitting this light just dissipate their heat into the cold depths of space, unless the heat was being somehow replenished?
What am I missing?
"A man cannot begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows." --Epictetus, 1st Century A.D.