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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!
Sometimes we study things just to scratch an itch, or possibly because the object under study might be of indirect relevance to us.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
and release enough long-lasting pollutants to make life unsustainable.
Huh? I might buy that we could kill ourselves off but it seems to be giving us too much credit to assume that we could kill off all life on this rock. Life has been around in one form or another for billions of years and has survived far more cataclysmic events than anything we could ever hope to dish out.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
So in about 5 billion years we won't hear all that global warming talk anymore?
Great!
.sig: No such file or directory
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.
Yeah, the crime of the modern educational system is that it produces people who know all the answers and have no sense of wonder. That "older than dirt" guy probably looks at a computer and only sees a white box.
You should look at a computer and see the thread of execution hopping between kernel routines and pausing at mutexes. You should see the electrons whooshing through the silicon, underneath an overhanging crystalline gate electrode. You should feel the electric field sucking at you: it's almost strong enough to rip electrons out of the SiO2 dielectric. And back up at higher level, those spin locks should be like an amusement park ride: puke your guts out if you go around in one for more than a few microseconds. :)
Yah, we knew stars became red giants. But that's not the right way to look at it.
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.
I think you have a hard time (as all of us do) imagining the time periods involved. There was even no mammals 1/10th of that 5 billion years ago; heck, life hadn't really colonized land yet.
And anyway, the Sun is slowly becoming brighter as time passes; in around 1 billion years theere will be no oceans left on Earth, no biosphere.
One that hath name thou can not otter
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.
I have one word for you: Babbage.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
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.
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
Disagree. I think a small human population (in the millions) will be around on Earth to witness the event.
I don't think the future humans will call themselves homo sapiens sapiens within a half a million years, let alone few billion. Whatever the species will be which will witness the event form sufficient distance, they need to be able to live past the event for it to have some significance.
Our beloved Milky Way will collide with the Andromeda in about 2 billion years like an intergalactic ejaculation. If the Earth has not been sterilized by asteroids by then, perhaps the radiation resulting from the collision will finish the job.
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/
I'm a geezer, but I agree with you -- but it's not geezers that see a computer as a black box, it's those uneducated in its workings. How many young people do you know that have programmed in assembly?
And I think you missed his main point, that the article's headline was disingenuous at least. If they have photos, why show an artist's conception? As he said, TFA didn't say anything I didn't read about when I was seven, and that was fifty years ago.
TFA is pure bunk. It's only good point is that you can google for the actual photos.
Free Martian Whores!
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.
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.
When Jesus comes back it will rock, I hope to get a ride off the planet if I am not raptured with an alien, "One of God's side projects."
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
Fail.
It was American Dad.
"I'm not sure I like the fugnutish tone you used in your post!" -RogL (608926)-
Right now the only way known to move the Earth would involve repeated close flybys with an asteroid which would by its nature be very slow. Something that would need to be started soon in a geological sense.
I don't think tides would be too much of a problem if Mars was orbiting at maybe 3 times the distance of the Moon or whatever distance would be roughly equal gravitationally to the Moon.
Of course we would probably have to move the Moon as well to make the orbital mechanics simpler depending on how far the Moon has moved away from the Earth due to tidal friction.
Article on moving the Earth, http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/planetearth/earth_move_010207.html
Also this is interesting, http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/solarsystem/death_of_earth_000224.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism