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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.
Mom, he won't stop saying whatever I say!
We'll be long gone - either in spacial or temporal sense - in a tiny fraction of that time. Even if there are no asteroid impact, killer viruses and so on, we will eventually deplete all natural resources - including ones need to make solar cells and wind turbines - and release enough long-lasting pollutants to make life unsustainable. So, an interesting astronomical curiosity, but no impact on our distant descendants. Now lets go work on being gone spacialy.
1) We learned about this in school
2) The picture is an artist's conception, I didn't see multiple pictures in TFA.
3) ???
4) Profit
Always proofread carefully to see if you any words out.
So in about 5 billion years we won't hear all that global warming talk anymore?
Great!
.sig: No such file or directory
We humans will destroy earth and Life much before this Star Life process gets its chance to do so. I wished to die the star way...
Isnt something we are seeing in the movie of 2012. Nothing to panic we humans would destroy the earth lot before by global warming therefore essential for us to have a solution for global warming.
Is an asterid belt some new meal from Burger King or something?
Our culture doesn't get smarter, it just finds new ways of being retarded.
It really really looks like a elliptical eclipsing binary, with one dim red giant, and a bright smaller white star. Note: The video is false color.
Not if the intelligent life out there has any capability to stop us.
There must be intelligent life in the universe, because none of them have contacted us yet. Joy-riding adolescent hooligans do not count, regardless of what they're riding, driving, or, flying.
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
Again, what's up with the negativity?
First, why would other intelligent life bother to stop us? Because resources in the universe is scarce? Last time I checked we haven't discovered any Dyson Sphere built around any of the stars in the Milky Way. And why has nobody scooped up all the intergalactic medium in outer space? Have our telescopes seen anybody moving stars around for energy transport? People using the beam from active galactic nuclei as weapons? No? If those ultra-intelligent life are really as good as they're hyped up to be, why aren't we seeing some totally amazing stuff happening all around us?
Second thing, it didn't really take much time for life to appear on Earth on a cosmic timescale. If you look at the time it took for our solar system and life to form, it is actually on the same order of magnitude to the whole history of the whole universe itself. If we're one of the late-comers, shouldn't we find that the universe has formed 1 trillion years ago, our solar system has only formed in the last 5 billion years, and life only in the last 2 billion years? Instead, what we're seeing now is, the universe formed some 13 billion years ago, our solar system formed 9 billion years ago, and life appeared in the last 3.5 billion years. There's actually a pretty decent chance that we're one of the earliest intelligent life in the universe.
You know, if immortality is within reach of my generation, I'm totally looking forward to have an AGN as my toy.
http://xkcd.com/676/ which happens to appear with exquisite timing
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
Our sun hasn't died yet, so shouldn't it be the other way around? In a few billion years, our sun will mimic the death of this star.
Alright, I'm done being pedantic now.
It's alright. The Yellowstone Caldera will blow up long before then and kill us all. So we won't be around to face the heat death of the Sun.
It is good to know these things.
I am anarch of all I survey.
It has nothing to do with TFA but it just occured to me - do we know of any system where the central body is not a star (or a more massive object), for example let's imagine Jupiter in place of the Sun?
Would it be possible to detect this kind of system at all?
"Blah blah blah." - [citation needed]
Last time I checked we haven't discovered any Dyson Sphere built around any of the stars in the Milky Way.
Sorry to nitpick but - kind of by definition, if someone managed to build a Dyson sphere around their star to harvest all of it's solar output, we wouldn't see that star. Just like you can't see a match when it's in a box. Possibly the only way to detect it would be via its gravity.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
if someone managed to build a Dyson sphere around their star to harvest all of it's solar output, we wouldn't see that star. Just like you can't see a match when it's in a box. Possibly the only way to detect it would be via its gravity.
Not so. The Dyson sphere would reradiate all the star's output as waste heat at whatever temperature the inhabitants liked to live. It would look like a large infrared giant, instead of a small yellow star.
The folks at Harvard-Smithsonian and IOTA did some fine work. It could have been reported as they presented it and been very interesting science. When it gets filtered through a fake science reporting agent like Science Daily, and rewritten by one of said agent's fiction writers with only enough relevant background to make them capable of finding FUDish material that wouldn't be entirely inapplicable, the result is something that should have been rejected by the only places to which it should have been submitted: Hollywood movie producers.
The sun is a nearly a dwarf star. It will undergo a very mild death compared to larger stars. They will nova or supernova, but the sun will placidly swell to a red giant, pulse as it burns out, then shrink to white dwarf. Only true dwarf stars will undergo a milder demise, skipping the red giant phase. No amount of mediocre Hollywood scifi horrification and awfulism will change the fact that our mild mannered stellar companion has no evil supervillian alter ego waiting to take over at its end of days. Adding such extraneous comic book (as opposed to the more respectable graphic fiction) "reporting" is only done by a writer, or at the behest of an editor or publisher, who have no confidence in the science itself or their reportage of it being sufficiently interesting. rather than risk being factual for a readership interested in such things, they attempt to draw in a greater audience with an interest and education in science equal to that of the author's writing style, with the assumption that by adding the pseudo-scientific car wreck material they can get that larger audience to slow down and rubber neck at the bloody mess of hyperbole spray painted over the facts.
SD is as useful and accurate a source for science as The Economist, which has also been quoted here for similarly poor reasons. Slashdotters are for the most part sophisticated enough to be able to appreciate the facts without having to viddy the horrorshow while sipping a bit of the moloko plus (obSFref, Clockwork Orange). Th remainder, while not so inclined to factualism in science, are still so invariably capable when it comes to traditional /. reply banter that an article consisting of raw data would likely end up in a verbal tsunami repleat with references to Microsoft, Google and MafIAA (blaming them for the stellar death no doubt) and welcoming our Red Giant Overlords and their Soviet Russian Beowulf Clusters.
The very worst part of this example of poor writing in lieu of science journalism is being kept separate because it has nothing to do with science. Something that is happening now (or being observed now, relatively speaking) does not and can not mimic something that will happen in the future, whether that be in 5 billion years, or next week when you accept a job writing equally badly for an outlet equally unwilling to risk actual factual journalism. Unless, of course, one an say that one's present insufficient income from writing such trash mimics the income one will receive in the future when one continues of a career path of writing badly for outlets intentionally presenting said trash. All the more reason to stay in school, kids, and if you quit, go back.
Now, I don't expect /. readers to follow Astrophysical Journal and the like in order to get unadulterated science to report on here. But I would hope that the submitters and editors would at least acknowledge the quality of the sources by presenting them such as "With their typical crunchy coating of fiction, fact mangling and FUD surrounding a center of creamy scientific nougat still untouched by science journalists' hands, Science Daily reassures us that it is 'an excellent driver' while setting fire to and waving madly an interesting article" dot dot dot.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
beating like a giant heart with a period
What a bloody mess.
alias possession='chmod 666 satan && ls
I panicked for a moment - I thought it said five million.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I saw the "Dying Star" in the headline and thought this article was about Lindsay Lohan.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Just a minor correction. the scientists did use interferometry but it was not "very long baseline interferometry". The "very long" term applies to the telescopes being separated by extreme distances, say over the entire United States as is the case of the VLBA. Also, the VLBA can only function in radio wavelengths because the data can be taken at the individual telescopes an recombined later. With near-infrared interferometry, what the authors of this study were using, requires that the light from each telescope be sent down an optical tube with mirrors and recombined at a central location which constrains the IOTA telescopes to be close together.
IOTA was dismantled a few years ago, geiven that a new optical/near-infrared interferometry was coming online, CHARA http://www.chara.gsu.edu/CHARA/
Arthur C Clarke once mused that gamma ray bursts were alien industrial accidents.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
A hugely expanded sun would be a hot, tenuous gas by the time it expands to earth orbit. People could acutal live in it with minor protection. But the hot gas would relentlessly erode anything on the earth's surface. And eventually it would corrode away the earth itself after millions of years.
There must be intelligent life in the universe, because none of them have contacted us yet.
I think your tongue is firmly in your cheek with that twisted logic, but for the wooshful among us, it's possible that our solar system is the first for life to develop at all. There may not only not be intelligent life elsewhere, there may not be any life at all except here. We just don't know yet.
Free Martian Whores!
New close-up photos of the surface of this distant star show its throbbing motions in unprecedented detail.
Rule 34, baby!!
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
A presently dying star cannot mimic the death of our own star, since it has not happened yet. How about using "foreshadows" instead?
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
I thought that "Artists Conception" looked oddly familiar. Then I remembered this; http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/Discoveries/2009/0729/are-astronomers-watching-the-beginning-of-the-end-for-betelgeuse
I seem to remember it was also in a Slashdot article that references this.
Uhm... so which is it, people? Or is it just clip art?
If their technology was sufficiently advanced, they would be able to capture all EM output of the star. So, like the parent, I believe that we've already found evidence of advanced civilizations wrapping off the stars for themselves: "dark matter."
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
If those ultra-intelligent life are really as good as they're hyped up to be, why aren't we seeing some totally amazing stuff happening all around us?
Prime Directive ;)
The last invention of an intelligent species in the universe is realistic simulation. That's it. After that species degenerate without ever building the big stuff we can see. That's the fate of self-made gods. I think we'll blow ourselves up first, though. Or sweat to death with AGW.
Even with realistic simulation, the law of natural selection and the law of scarcity still apply. As long as the civilization still reproduce and expand, in economy and/or in population - they'll always need more from the real world.
So I don't think realistic simulation changes too much here. The civilization will still need to expand and innovate.
Here's something I don't get about the universe - maybe someone more well versed in astronomy or physics could educate me. The universe itself seems to be a fundamentally unsustainable system, dying from the moment it was 'born'. So far, I don't believe we've found any star that has been around "forever" and hasn't burned itself out yet, and I don't think we've seen any new ones created recently either (correct me if I'm wrong on either count).
Granted, 5 billion years is a long time when compared to the human lifespan (or even the existence of the entire species), but it seems interesting that a universe that has existed for 13 billion years seems to have stars blowing themselves up well before then. With the number of stars we've seen die (and counting black holes, as well), it seems as if they've been dying for a very long time, considering how far some of them are away from earth.
Just a thought, I guess, but it seems kind of depressing to think that someday the universe might just be nothing but black holes, dead stars, and rocks.
Fail.
It was American Dad.
"I'm not sure I like the fugnutish tone you used in your post!" -RogL (608926)-
+1, Family Guy reference
Yes, since Family Guy was created by Seth McFarlane, who also created American Dad... which is where GP's quote came from. So, really a very thin, tenuous reference.
It is funny that American Dad has been somewhat funnier than Family Guy in the last year....
The Cleveland show is a bit of a disaster and I wish Cleveland would move back to Quahog...
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
The problem with the /. lead-in and the SD article quoting an astronomer is that THEY ARE BOTH PROBABLY WRONG! I have this problem all the time when I see shows on the Discovery Channel or the Science Channel where they explain how the sun *will* die in 5 billion years (The implicit assumption is that the current natural laws of physics will apply for that period -- and within an intelligent species framework that may be completely false. What they SHOULD be saying is "The sun, if allowed to continue on its natural evolutionary course, will die in 5 billion years." But qualified it, of course, sounds less dramatic. IMO, the probability of that occurring, is nearly zero. Why? Because our solar system is inhabited by an intelligent technological species and if we could stop talking about the next great iPhone app or global warming [1] for just a minute we might begin a discussion about how to develop real molecular scale nanotechnology [2] and the best way to approach dismantling the sun so it never becomes a red giant.
For the unaware, we are "dismantling" planets *now* -- what do you think launching satellites to explore foreign bodies (that don't return to earth) or crashing them into foreign bodies (where some of the material ejected may reach escape velocity for said body) is??? Now given the influx in asteroid/comet/solar ion debris I suspect the Earth is still in a net mass gaining state -- but we know how to invert that situation should we choose to do so. We do understand the physics involved and have the technology to manage it.
What most people are unaware of is that there has been some thought devoted to planetary dismantlement. Freeman Dyson did some (in discussing in 1960 in Science the dismantlement of Jupiter to create a Dyson shell) [1]). David Criswell [3] thought of some more/better paths to dismantlement.
So the answer is very clear -- we dismantle the sun at a rate which slows its aging -- so the 5 Billion years number becomes ENTIRELY fictional -- we cannot predict what a technological civilization would do. But there are significant odds that it might dismantle the sun to the point where its lifetime is on the order of that of a red dwarf (several hundred billion years or more with no red giant phase). Ample time to decide when and how to move to a new star with a new lease on life.
1. In a molecular nanotechnology enabled world, there isn't really a "global warming" perspective to worry about. It is too simple to take the CO2 out of the atmosphere and store it in some inert form. People who are in the hard-core "global warming" camp should ask themselves why when I wrote the paper "Sapphire Mansions" in 2001, did I not instead call them "Diamond Mansions"? [4] It was because I did not wish to encourage the sucking of CO2 out of the atmosphere to the extent that all plants would DIE!
2. Molecular scale Nanotechnology has been defined and reviewed since 1992 (Drexler, Nanosystems) -- over 15 ago!. During that period nobody has said it is "incorrect", nobody has said it violates "laws of physics", at the most people may have said it is "hard". But if I can point out 4+ paths to get there -- so one has to wonder if it is simply not a lack of technological imagination that keeps us from already being there (and as a species having such methods in our technology toolbox).
3. David R. Criswell from Interstellar Migration and the Human Experience, Eds.: Ben R. Finney and Eric M. Jones, University of California Press, 1985, Chapter 4, pp 50-87. 4. It may be worth noting that the "Sapphire Mansions" phase of human development I consider to probably be limited to a few decades -- while the "Matrioshka Brains" phase lasts the life of our engineered sun (or longer).