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Astronomers Find Unusual Star
First time accepted submitter JoshuaZ writes "Astronomers have found an unusual small star. SDSS J102915+172927 is a small faint star with very little of any elements other than hydrogen or helium. The star's composition is surprising (Pdf) since standard theories of star formation require heavier elements in small stars in order to allow the stars to be heavy enough to come together. Possibly the most unusual aspect of this star is the complete non-detection of lithium which would be expected in a star of this size. The only elements created shortly after the Big Bang were lithium, hydrogen and helium, and the star should have lithium levels much higher since they should correspond closely with the levels believed to have been formed shortly after the Big Bang."
So the next question is: How would someone go about mining a star?
>>God made it that way to test your faith.
If god wanted to test our faith with impossible stuff, he could have simply made a huge mountain-sized boulder magically float in air over the vatican, defying gravity. Miracles are more appreciated when they are closer home.
Jesus.
1) People calling something "dark" doesn't mean they literally believe that, for instance, "dark energy" exists. What they know is that observations cannot be accounted for without something that acts the way "dark energy" acts, in the equations they currently employ. There is enormous research in this field pursuing a wide range of approaches to reproducing the observations theoretically. The simplest models employ a "dark energy" -- literally, something that does not interact with light, and which has a pressure sufficiently negative as to accelerate the expansion of the universe. No-one -- and I mean NO-ONE -- who works in the field treats these as anything other than toy models. Phenomenology, to use the jargon. More complex models attempt to see what changes to the assumed laws of gravity are necessary to reproduce the effect. No-one who does this pretends that their model is anything other than a toy model. (Indeed, most modifications to gravity can be rephrased as a dark energy of the first kind anyway, albeit a really weird, ugly one. It's the motivation that's different.) More controversial models attempt to reproduce the observations by changing one of the fundamental assumptions that lead to the standard cosmological model: homogeneity. Violate homogeneity and you can influence the paths of photons around us in ways that mimic "dark energy". No-one working on this pretends that it's anything other than a toy model. Yet another approach is to point out that the universe is intrinsically inhomogeneous and anisotropic and attempt to reconstruct the homogeneous universe we employ in cosmology from that. No-one working on this pretends that the models studied so far are anything other than toy models.
It's not "scientists" "making up" "dark" "somethings" that can be "plugged into equations" but "never detected", it's people tagging a puzzling observation with a placeholder ("dark energy" for the anomalous acceleration of the universe; "dark matter" for the apparent necessity across a massive range of scales for large amounts of clustering matter that doesn't interact with light) and then exploring potential explanations.
I don't care if you were trying to joke. This kind of accusation really annoys me because it suggests that either we're terrible at explaining what's going on, or people simply aren't listening to us;, or both and people who argue this way tend to insinuate that those of us in astrophysics are a pack of idiots or charlatans fraudulently inventing arbitrary and unobservable physics in order to screw millions upon millions of euro from the honest taxpayer. And that's frankly offensive.