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."

Comments

You can't see the tail with your eyes

[Dekortage]

Read the article, bottom of the page: "Mira's tail is only visible in ultraviolet light, and does not show up in visible light."

Re:Dropping seeds all over the universe?

[kalidasa]

Roddenberry's intro to the novelization of Star Trek: The Motion Picture responds to the whole Kirk/Spock sexual tension thing in Kirk's voice with a disclaimer to the effect of (I'm paraphrasing from memory, and I read the book when it came out): "there's nothing wrong with two men being attracted to each other, but if I were to go in that direction, I think I'd choose a sexual partner who was interested more often than every 7 years." I can think of three women Kirk certainly slept with of the top of my head: the slave girl in Bread and Circuses, Miramanee, Carol Marcus; and there are a lot of probables.

Re:Faster than a speeding bullet?

[sholden]

Yes, because when they say supersonic they couldn't possibly mean oh I don't know faster than the speed of sound...

You know the speed that pressure changes can propogate through a fluid (such as the not-quite-vacuum intertelar medium around the star). That speed in which there's a change in the physics due to the formation of a shock wave (because the object is traveling faster than the pressure shift that "tells" the "upstream" fluid that the object is there).

100km/s or there abouts - depends on the local density of the interstellar medium.

Re:The NASA folks must have been watching bad film

[Trillian_1138]

Whether you believe the writers thought this when they wrote it is another issue altogether.

According to the script, they (Lucas) knew it and knew Solo was wrong. From http://www.blueharvest.net/scoops/anh-script.shtml (A New Hope script):

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

Re:Dropping seeds all over the universe?

[Bemopolis]

I started a list, but rather than underline my geek-dom of All Things Trek, I'll just demonstrate a mastery of Some Things Interweb:

Kirk's Bedpost Notches

In my defense, there were a couple that even I couldn't remember.