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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
Only if it wanted to drop seeds on it's sister star.
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.
Who immediately thought of Jiminy Cricket?
[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
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
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!
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
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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