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Oldest Known Star In the Universe Discovered
Zothecula writes "A team of astronomers at The Australian National University working on a five-year project to produce the first comprehensive digital survey of the southern sky has discovered the oldest known star in the Universe. The star dates back 13.7 billion years, only shortly after the Big Bang itself. It's also nearby (at least, from a cosmological perspective) — about 6,000 light-years away. The star is notable for the very small amount of iron it contains (abstract). The lead researcher, Stefan Keller, said, 'To make a star like our Sun, you take the basic ingredients of hydrogen and helium from the Big Bang and add an enormous amount of iron – the equivalent of about 1,000 times the Earth's mass. To make this ancient star, you need no more than an Australia-sized asteroid of iron and lots of carbon. It's a very different recipe that tells us a lot about the nature of the first stars and how they died.'"
I thought William Shatner was the oldest star.
According to TFA this star itself was likely born from the death of a genuinely primordial star (which would have started with almost nothing by hydrogen and helium). One of the upshots of this work is that some primordial stars may have produced much less iron than some models have suggested which could explain some discrepancies in the observed isotopic ratios in some old stars. According to the actual article (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature12990.html which may be behind a paywall) this star has an apparent visual magnitude of 14.7. This puts this star just in the limits of amateur observations. Charon has an apparent magnitude of around 15.5 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charon_(moon) and that's been successfully imaged by amateurs (larger apparent magnitude means dimmer because astronomers are silly) http://www.universetoday.com/20351/charon-imaged-by-amateur-astronomers/ , so this star could be looked at by a dedicated amateur in the southern hemisphere.
The star is notable for the very small amount of iron it contains (abstract). The lead researcher, Stefan Keller, said..
ISWYDT
If he is a lead researcher, what does he know about iron? I found in my old astronomy textbook a list of the elements that make-up the top 99.99997% of the mass of the sun. Lead is not in that list. Why have a lead expert involved instead of an iron researcher involved? The reason we're interested in this star is because of the low mass of iron, not lead.
There is only ONE book you need. The Holy Bible. King James translation.
A translation, by definition, is not the same as the original, Words get changed, meanings change, stuff gets made up when the translator gets fed up and wants to go to lunch early.
King James' translators were no better than any of them. Your faith isn't so much in God as you may think it is. Your faith is actually in those translators, that they did a correct and accurate job. Because you have no idea what the original works actually said, do you? Somebody has told you what it says. Perhaps many somebodies.
When average people talk you about... weather, politics, the best dog food to buy, or whether Pizza Hut, Papa Johns, or Dominos has the best pizza, do you take what they say at face value and believe it? No, probably not. You know how people are full of crap, make stuff up, or are simply delusional. Being wacko is almost normal.
But you trust your faith, the most important thing there is for many people, in the words translated by people hundreds of years ago. Whom you cannot talk to about pizza or anything else. You have no idea whether they were the best scholars ever, or merely humans who thought the same wacko things you find everywhere. I bet the latter because people are people, and most of them are wacko.
Stuff like that scares the crap out of me. I know how much people make stuff up. Some more than others. There is no way I can base something like faith on a book like that. If you can, good for you.
Well, of course you can and you will believe it. Because the alternative, that even a small part of what you believe might be wrong, is impossible to accept. It could not possibly be wrong, so it will never be wrong. You are safe.
Sig for hire.
I don't get it. If it so old it should be an ember by now, or does it still radiate ? If its only 6k ly from here then it still radiates right ? Also, if it is so old it should have 'expanded' away enormously.... or not. Its like finding a live dinosaur in your back yard.
The King James bible was translated at a king's (god's appointed representative) order, by translators who were divinely inspired. Or so they said. Believing in it is no more irrational than believing in the actual original accounts, verbal or written, or the Hebrew copies, or the Greek copies, or the Book of Mormon, or Hubbard's science fiction. Okay, maybe slightly less irrational than believing in that last one, because Hubbard declared in advance he was full of shit rather than claiming to have a direct pipeline to a supreme being. Or maybe not.
Larger apparent magnitude means dimmer because magnitude is on a log scale, similar to pH is a log scale with a negative sign. Brightness = 2.512^(-Magnitude)
That's not the "news" part, in the same way an article about a plane crash is not "news" of gravity. Not everyone on the planet has listened to Sagan and his "we are star stuff" speech, some people still need to be taught (including first year astronomy students). A rehashing of "basic knowlege" helps these readers understand how the astronomers determined the age of the star in question, after all the stars age is the "news" part.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
After all, when you look at the Earth from space, you see mostly nitrogen, oxygen, and water vapor. It's always a problem to infer the interior of something from what you see on the outside (as in, you can't judge a book by its cover). The proposed LENR (Cold Fusion) physics, perhaps along with some notion of quantum decay of nuclei leading to outgassed hydrogen (my suggestion), could provide a way that a sun (or planet, including the Earth) made of mostly nickel and iron could produce a lot of internal heat from LENR.
No. The solar neutrino flux is almost precisely that which is proposed by models and this does let us check our models. We can also estimate the sun's density if it had an iron core. It would be much denser and it wouldn't have an easy way to prevent collapse. There's also no plausible model for anything remotely like this to form naturally. Those are just a few of the many problems with this suggestion. Thinking about ideas is good but please be aware that it is extremely unlikely that a single individual thinking on their own is going to come up with a serious problem in theories that withstood many empirical tests over the last 50 years, and even less likely to then come up with the correct hypothesis. Claiming that the sun is mostly iron isn't the same level as claiming that evolution hasn't happened, but it isn't that far off. At minimum, a glance at your website shows no predictions that would differ from standard. At minimum to be taking seriously you need to propose some test that can be done that will strongly differentiate your model from the standard explanation. Without that, there's little reason to pay attention.
The important thing is that the English language has changed since the KJV was finished, so that there are things that don't mean the same thing now as they did back then. As an example, back then, "kill" meant "murder." (Note that David slew Goliath, not killed him.) If you don't take this into account, and many Bible literalists don't, not only won't you know what it's saying, you won't even realize that there's an issue.
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It is indeed historical. The ancient Greeks divided the stars in 6 categories or magnitudes, magnitude 1 for the brightest stars to 6 for those barely visible with the naked eye. The mathematical formula only emerged later (1856 by Pogson) who defined the brightness scale by: a magnitude 1 star is 100 times brighter than a magnitude 6 star and Polaris is magnitude 2 which more or less fitted the ancient magnitude scale.
Hot fusion has been replicated many times on the surface of the Earth in: Hydrogen bombs (uncontrolled), Tokamaks, Stellerators, Z-pinch machines, Farnsworth fusors (in peoples backyard shed) and other devices. We have not managed to extract more energy from it than we put in, but we certainly replicated it.