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

Re:Older than dirt

[daveime]

Konrad Zuse (1910-1995) is recognized as the inventor of the first freely programmable computer, and he was European, German to be precise.

Now STFU, stupid American.

Re:Global warming

[Dunbal]

we humans would destroy the earth lot before by global warming

      Apparently we're going to have to work a lot harder to do that because the Earth has been through (and shrugged off) far worse changes than the current one.

      Now consider that along with the fact that recently Dr. Maslowski confirmed that Al Gore was misusing and misquoting data supplied by him to support his political agenda. Consider the mere fact that the push for the idea of "global warming" is coming from the POLITICAL, not the scientific, end of society. Consider the fact that "global warming" has opened up a multi-billion dollar a year "carbon offset" market, and new taxation revenue streams for government.

      There is a motive to convince you that the world is going to end. People are willing to believe the world will end for any reason, from the arrival of comets, to planetary alignments and eclipses, to the "return" of "the son of man" (who is coming soon - any day now...). If politicians start clamoring for it, and misuse scientific data to "back up" their claims, there are any number of sheep who will bleat to that tune. To the point where people are already turning violent at "protests" - which can only represent a certain degree of fanaticism about the subject. But simply believing something to be true DOES NOT MAKE IT TRUE.

      Still, don't worry. The oil won't last forever. In fact, once we reach peak oil, its availability will diminish dramatically due to exorbitant prices (look what happened when oil reached a mere $150/bbl, now imagine it at $1500/bbl) as countries compete for the last drops of oil and society has NO CHOICE but to switch to alternative energy. Since the Earth has already demonstrated that it has returned from far worse temperatures/CO2 levels than today, even if global warming was "man-made", the Earth will purge itself of "our pollution" in a few hundred years once we stop "polluting the atmosphere with our CO2".

      However if it's not man-made, well, temperatures are going to rise even when the oil is gone. That will have a lot of people scratching their heads and wondering why they're paying all those carbon taxes in 100 years or so, when oil production/consumption is diminished or negligible. And they will stay at their peak for a hundred years or so. I can imagine some politicians in the far future patting themselves on the back when temperatures return to normal...

 

I Didn't Know The Sun Blows

[ThePadrinoDotCom]

I Didn't Know The Sun Blows But today found out why the sun will blow up seems we need to start prepareing it's only 5 billion years from now. The Padrino Dot Com http://www.thepadrino.com/