Dying Star Mimics Our Sun's Death

coondoggie writes "In about 5 billion years, our Sun will face a nasty death. Scientists with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics this week released dramatic new pictures of a dying star much like the Sun, about 550 light-years from Earth. According to the researchers, Chi Cygni has swollen in size to become a red giant star so large that if it were in our solar system it would swallow every planet out to Mars and cook the asteroid belt. The star has started to pulse dramatically, beating like a giant heart with a period of 408 days." The research team produced a video of the pulsating star, using infrared images captured via very long baseline interferometry.

Comments

Link to images, etc.

[severn2j]

For those that cant follow links to the source, the images/mov and artists impression is here

http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/news/2009/pr200923_images.html

Re:Weird video...?

[Sockatume]

I assume that the star is tilted relative to us and there's some anisotropy of the atmosphere due to its oblate shape. If the poles were hotter and one was tilted at us, I guess.

Re:Do we care?

[mrsquid0]

The Sun is slowly getting hotter (over timescales of hundreds of millions of years) due to changes in the composition of its core. In about one billion years this increase in temperature will be enough to have boiled off Earth's oceans making Earth a dead planet. This will happen long before the Sun becomes a red giant, so unfortunately there will be no humans around to witness it, unless if we leave first and pay a visit to watch Sol's demise.