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."
Wikipedia may state that, the NASA press release claims it's travelling at 130 km/s, doesn't say what that's relative to but I would suspect the neighbourhood average (since there's a bow shock it has to be relative to that I would assume). Of course is could be relative to the ether and NASA keeping a rather large change in physics to themselves...
Also note that NASA used the term supersonic.
Reminds me of this Benford story. Call it the Bullet!
How many football fields would 13 light-years be?
I'd say that it increases the chances of the story getting picked up by newspapers. I'm sure they could've provided a bit more on that single page for that end of the paddock and others?
'Thats they exact same thing a banana wrench monkey.'
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.
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?
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