Slashdot Mirror
Cosmic Fireworks Display Seen Inside Helix Nebula
goran72 writes "A new image, taken with an infrared camera on the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii, has revealed a cosmic fireworks display, in the form of tens of thousands of previously unseen comet-shaped knots inside the Helix Nebula. Unlike previous optical images of the Helix Nebula knots, the infrared image shows thousands of clearly resolved knots, extending out from the central star at greater distances than previously observed. These images enable astronomers to estimate that there may be as many as 40,000 knots in the entire nebula, each of which are billions of kilometers/miles across. Their total mass may be as much as 30,000 Earths, or one-tenth the mass of our Sun."
The French do it better. This amateur Helix Nebula is just slapping together any old 'exposed inner core' with another 'exposed inner core' over 10,000 to 1,000,000 years to illuminate ejected material. Where's the precision in that?
A new image, taken with an infrared camera on the Slashdot Telescope on SourceForge, has revealed a cosmic fireworks display, in the form of tens of thousands of sparks flying from the NAOJ.org hosting site. Unlike previous optical images of the hosting site, the infrared image shows thousands of clearly resolved sparks, extending out from the central rack at greater distances than previously observed. These images enable sysadmins to estimate that there may be as many as 40,000 sparks in the entire datacenter, each of which is several inches long. Their total heat may be as much as 30,000 hits per second, or one-tenth the power of a Sun Fire E10K.
So the practical implication of this is that rocky planets are a lot more common than previously thought, or that we have a better explanation of how they're created, or... what? These are great photos, but what's the story here?
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
google cache is here , but it seems slashdotted too.
Here is the original paper : http://arxiv.org/abs/0906.2870 . Note that HST detected about 3500 of these, so this is an advance, not an overturning, of older work. These knots are pretty strange.
The Helix Nebulae is a sphere of gas expelled by a dying star, probably in multiple episodes, with. many thousands of these "comet-like objects." Typical theoretical speculation is that they are gas instabilities as old gas is overtaken by new gas expulsions, possibly with dusty cores. In addition, the knots are expanding (away from the central star) significantly slower than the gas of the nebulae. If you Google or go to Arxiv.org, you can find lots of speculation on these knots.
For myself, I have to wonder if these could be "planetary comets" - i.e., giant comets resulting from the heating of bodies in the Oort cloud of the star. The mass is about right, and that would explain their longevity, but it is not clear why they would be expanding away from the central star.
"Suburu" is the Japanese name for the Pleiades cluster. I've heard from various sources that the word means "Unite", "5 brothers" or is just a given name. (Anybody speak Japanese?) It's also the nickname of Fuji Heavy Industries, which was formed by the merger of a Japanese manufacturing cartel also known as the 5 brothers.. And FHI, of course, makes the car, which uses the Pleiades as its logo.
Although in Hawaii, the Suburu Telescope is owned by the Japanese National Observatory, hence the Japanese name.
Is this evidence of extra-terrestrial life?
The organized and deliberate complexity of those 'knots' certainly seems to suggest so.
can this be right ?
"The size of each knot is about five times as big as Pluto's orbit in the Solar System"
ie, that the size of each of those little knots is 5x the size of our entire solar system ? wow.
from http://www.naoj.org/Pressrelease/2009/07/02/fig2.jpg and http://www.naoj.org/Pressrelease/2009/07/02/fig4.jpg i would estimate the size of the entire nebula to be about 400 to 500 times the size of the solar system.
Oh say can you see ... o'er the land of the flneep
By the nebula's light
What so proudly we hailed
At the comet's last gleaming...
And the home of the g'znarbilywarblave!
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
What no one is saying or maybe even thinking is: "Hope to God that no people call a planet of that star 'home'!". Just think if you were a resident of a planet in that system. That fireworks display might mean one of those fireballs just carried off your moon and destabilized the orbit of your planet, turning it into an ellipse with a really cold high point. Since it is in a nebula, maybe the inhabitants of that system possess interstellar flight capability and at least some of them left, seeing as we are talking about a really old system. I am sure some wag will have something cute or 'skeptikal' about this, but suppose were are really thinking about real people, however alien to us. They would be God's creations as well.
Won't someone think of the alien children?
we obviously need to ban stars. I mean look at our sun, it is the number one heat source contributing to global warming.
The last technician to work on the spacecraft before launch sneezed on the lens and was too embarrassed to clean it off.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Citation here.
But, I wanted socialized health insurance!