Slashdot Mirror
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.
Even worse than the speeding bullet part is the section on this page(last paragraph) where it says that 'Coincidentally, Mira and its "whale of a tail" can be found in the tail of the whale constellation.' I think NASA just likes making dumb jokes and references in their media announcements.
Surrealism: You have two giraffes. The government pays you to take harmonica lessons.
That's Radial Velocity. Tangential... I can't be bothered to work out.
[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."
Well anyway, the real question is:
Is it more powerful than a locomotive?
A speeding bullet, duh.
No, the REAL question is: Will it blend?
SRSLY.
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
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!
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
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.
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
Perhaps an easier way of representing it is that if each football field was represented as a library of congress you would need 11,208,339 of them
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.