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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.
Well, sun, you're so bright, take care of it yourself.
rewriting history since 2109
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