Dying Star Weaves a Trillion-Mile-Wide Spiral In the Sky

The Bad Astronomer writes "Using the newly-commissioned ALMA radio observatory, astronomers have taken detailed images of one of the most amazing objects in the sky: the red giant R Sculptoris (abstract). As the star dies, it undergoes gigantic seizures beneath its surface that blast out waves of gas and dust from the surface. These normally expand into a spherical shell, but the presence of a nearby companion star changes things. The combined orbits of the two stars fling out the material like a garden sprinkler, forming enormous and incredibly beautiful spiral arms. Measuring the size and shape of the spiral shows the last eruption was 1800 years ago, lasted for nearly two centuries, and expelled enough material to make a thousand earths."

Comments

:P

[CosaNostra Pizza Inc]

That's nothing. I could do that as a kid with Spirograph. :P

Re::P

[CosaNostra Pizza Inc]

Even more impressive...I was first post.

Re::P

[mcgrew]

Even more impressive...I was first post.

About damned time, too. Where is everybody today?

Re::P

[Anonymous Coward]

Working, this isn't reddit...

Re::P

[K. S. Kyosuke]

I'm rather inclined to think that as far impressiveness is concerned, being an owner of a trillion-mile-wide Spirograph beats any number of first posts, hands down.

Re::P

[Anonymous Coward]

That's nothing. I could do that as a kid with Spirograph. :P

The real one doesn't have a wonky green pen line across it where the wheel came off, though.

Stellar death by Goatse

[GodfatherofSoul]

You can call that beautiful if you want. Ewww!

Enough material to make a thousand earths.

[sconeu]

Could someone please put that in more standard units, such as either VW beetles if they're talking about mass, or Olympic-sized swimming pools, if they're talking about volume?

Re:Enough material to make a thousand earths.

[MikeyC01]

If everything moves to the metric system how will we measure things without units like

- libraries of congress
- earths
- olympic sized swimming pools
- shittons (although there are metric shittons)

??

Re:Enough material to make a thousand earths.

[Anonymous Coward]

Can we use Olympic size swimming pools at standard temperature and pressure to represent mass? It would be nice to standardize on something.

Re:Enough material to make a thousand earths.

[Charliemopps]

Our modern metric system was long ago based on:
one meter is equal to one ten-millionth of the length of the Earth's meridian along a quadrant through Paris.
And the old definition of a gram was:
the absolute weight of a volume of water equal to the cube of the hundredth part of the meter, at the temperature of melting ice.

So technically our measurement for length is based on the size of the earth. And our measurement for mass is based on our measurement for length and there-by indirectly based on the size of the earth. So using the earth as a unit of measurement is perfecting in line with the metric system. Even if we have, in recent years refined those measurements using light waves and such so we can apply them to nonsense like atoms.

I guess I'm nitpicking, but so are you ;-p

Re:Enough material to make a thousand earths.

[mister_playboy]

Earth's mass, roughly enough to remember easily: 6x10^24 kg

Don't forget to renew your geek card...

Re:Enough material to make a thousand earths.

[TheSkepticalOptimist]

So the metric system is based on science, while the Imperial system is based on the crap someone could find in their near vicinity to measure with, like the nearest stone, hand, foot, or how long their horse could ride before working up a sweat. I would suggest then the modern Imperial measurement system is based on American football field lengths, amount of concrete in a sidewalk between New York and Chicago, Phelps sized swimming pools, and how far their Hemi V8 engine can drive before requiring a tank-up. You know, the stuff God gave us to measure with instead of some bullshit sciencey mumbo-jumbo.

Re:Enough material to make a thousand earths.

[Charliemopps]

Well, no... they were both based on nonsense to begin with. The original meter was probably just an arm length or something silly. The only reason the metric system makes more sense is because it's base 10, which is what our common numerical system is based on. The only reason that base 10 is common is because we have 10 fingers. So the metric system is common because people could count on their fingers to make sense of it easier. I don't think that makes it more "Scientific", it just makes it so you don't have to use a pencil to do simple math.

Re:Enough material to make a thousand earths.

[Anonymous Coward]

If everything moves to the metric system how will we measure things without units like...

Unambiguously.
Aside from that, I couldn't give >0.3 millifucks.

Re:Enough material to make a thousand earths.

[Chris Burke]

Earth is 100 mole of 1kg masses!

Or, approximately 1000 mole of Townsend's moles.

Does that help? No? Okay.

Re:Enough material to make a thousand earths.

[Chris Burke]

Did I just get Avogadro's Number wrong by a factor of 10?

Anyone have a Bat'leth I can commit geek seppuku with?

Re:Enough material to make a thousand earths.

[PPH]

Old Beetles or new Beetles?

Re:Enough material to make a thousand earths.

[Required Snark]

How come you're posting in English, rather then Esperanto or Loglan? Remember, all natural human language is based on "the crap someone could find in their near vicinity"?

Re:Enough material to make a thousand earths.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not just base 10, but also has units that are all interrelated. Good luck figuring out how many cubic inches are in a gallon.

Re:Enough material to make a thousand earths.

[RaceProUK]

Done

Re:Enough material to make a thousand earths.

[Anonymous Coward]

Back in my day... sometime between 1900 and the 60s, the litre was defined in terms of a kilogram of water and actually disagreed with the exact conversion with cubic centimeters. Good luck figuring out the conversion, as it required some precise equipment and advanced skills...

Re:Yet More Proof That God Exists!

[Anonymous Coward]

Whose g-d(s)?

Re:Yet More Proof That God Exists!

[An ominous Cow art]

Sauron is watching us...

older than itself

[Bob-taro]

FTA:

... Others fade away slowly over hundreds of billions of years, longer than the cosmos has been around.

Is it just me or does that not make sense?

Re:older than itself

[Anonymous Coward]

I presumed that it meant that they will fade away for hundreds of billions of years (into the future).

Re:older than itself

[mcgrew]

Is it just me or does that not make sense?

The universe is a little younger than 14 billion years old. If it takes a hundred billion years for a star to fade away, that's six times the length the universe has existed up to this point.

Re:older than itself

[Anonymous Coward]

It's just you.

Re:older than itself

[Bob-taro]

I presumed that it meant that they will fade away for hundreds of billions of years (into the future).

I see, it was just me then. Thanks.

trillions and trillions

[Speare]

I can't do Libraries of Congress for linear distance, but I think there's something better than a trillion miles.

So I asked Google for "1 trillion miles in au". An astronomical unit (1 AU) is the Sun-to-Earth orbit's average radius. I forget how many miles that is, and that's kind of the point.

1 trillion miles = 10757.8002 Astronomical Units

To put that in perspective, Earth is in a middle ring of our solar system. Pluto is way out there. I ignored other far-flung rocks like Xena or Gabrielle or whatever they're calling them these days.

Google's Calculator doesn't memorize "radius of pluto's orbit in au" but on the Pluto Fact Sheet I found Semimajor axis (AU) 39.48168677.

Diameter of our solar system is then ~80 AU. I did look up the heliopause for a farther "edge of our solar system, and got Starting in May 2012 at 120 AU, Voyager 1 detected a sudden increase in cosmic rays, an apparent signature of approach to the heliopause.. Both are miniscule compared to ~10800 AU for this article's celestial feature.

I remembered that the nearest neighbor star is roughly 4 light years away. Let's not quibble about precision, one digit is enough.

4 light years = 252,958.905 Astronomical Units

Re:trillions and trillions

[hackertourist]

1 trillion miles = 0.17 lightyears.

that's no star

[circletimessquare]

LUKE
Look at him. He's headed for that
red star.

HAN
I think I can get him before he gets
there... he's almost in range.

The red star begins to take on the appearance of a monstrous
glowing spiral aurora.

BEN
That's no star! It's a groovy space
hallucination.

HAN
It's too 1960s Star Trek special effect
to be a groovy space hallucination.

LUKE
I have a very bad feeling about this.
Look, my hands have eyeballs.

HAN
Yeah, I think your right. Everyone vomit
and purge! Chewie, where did you get
those mushrooms you put in last night's
stew?

prospects for novel planetary formation?

[wierd_w]

If the red giant star is spewing that much matter, and has a companion star that for all practical purposes will greatly outlive its partner, what are the prospects for novel planetary formation from this structure over cosmological time?

Re:Hey everybody, it's Phil Plait!

[Anonymous Coward]

People submit stories linking to their own blog all the time on Slashdot. And mostly people only complain when that blog is just a copy-paste of a more authoritative source without a link to the original source. In this case, the summary has a direct link to the original paper (which is almost exceptional toward the good side of story summaries or even science journalism in general), and the linked blog adds considerable, original written content.

The fact you only care when one particular person does this and bother to reply with this to many of his submissions suggests you have some sort of personal problem that you are hiding behind such an empty and transparent complaint. Keep up the fight, maybe you will slay one of your personal demons via collateral damage in your oh so noble crusade against a single blogger.

I don't mean to be persnicketty but

[Progman3K]

Why can't they report it by saying "the star spewed out x% of it's mass" instead of the meaningless "enough material to make a thousand earths"

I mean I appreciate that it lost a lot of material, but I'm more interested in knowing how much that material represents to the star than knowing how may 'earths' I could make out of it.

Re:I don't mean to be persnicketty but

[Chris Burke]

If you're interested in knowing more then you should read the article, where the figure you request is given and then converted into the perhaps more meaningful for getting a sense of scale to the average person '# of earths' measurement.

Re:Yet More Proof That God Exists!

[dwye]

Eye of Kdapt! Don't you know that Sauron's Eye was shaped like a cat's, not a spiral.

Yay Debian!

[Anonymous Coward]

That's some awesome banner you got up there, the ultimate recognition!

Companion?

[Anonymous Coward]

I’m glad you asked! Unlike U Cam, R Sculptoris has a companion. It’s probably a smaller star, like a red dwarf or even something more like the Sun.

Not necessarily glad u asked. It could also be that R Sculptoris itself is spinning, although a companion seems like a better bet.