Scientists Discover Biggest Star 202
Hugh Pickens writes "Scientists at the University of Sheffield have discovered the most massive stellar giant, R136a1 measured at 265 solar masses, using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile and data from the Hubble Space Telescope. It's in the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small 'satellite' galaxy which orbits the Milky Way. Previously, the heaviest known stars were around 150 times the mass of the Sun, known as the 'Eddington Limit,' and this was believed to be close to the cosmic size limit because as stars get larger, the amount of energy created in their cores grows faster than the force of gravity which holds them together. 'Because of their proximity to the Eddington Limit they lose mass at a pretty high rate,' says Professor Paul Crowther, the chief researcher in the Sheffield team. Hyper-stars like R136a1 are believed to be formed from several young stars merging together, and are only found in the very heart of stellar clusters. R136a1 is believed to have a surface temperature of more than 40,000 degrees Celsius, and is 10 million times brighter than the Sun. Crowther adds that R136a1 is about as big as stars can get. 'Owing to the rarity of these monsters, I think it is unlikely that this new record will be broken any time soon.'"
You think that's big!?!?!? (Score:5, Funny)
"Owing to the rarity of these monsters, I think it is unlikely that this new record will be broken any time soon.""
Owing to the size of the universe, I think it is likely that this new record will be broken sometime soon.
Two theories, now let's sit back and see who's right!
Re:You think that's big!?!?!? (Score:5, Insightful)
Two theories, now let's sit back and see who's right!
I think he'll be right for human scales of "soon", and you'll be right for cosmological scales.
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Yea, the only way we'd stand a good chance of finding a bigger star than this would be...well, let's just say there'd have to be thousands of stars for that to even be possible.
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Crowther adds that R136a1 is about as big as stars can get.
Right.
That's what Eddintgon said [mit.edu]
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Yea, the only way we'd stand a good chance of finding a bigger star than this would be...well, let's just say there'd have to be thousands of stars for that to even be possible.
The odds of such a star existing is very, very different than the odds of us finding it. The circumstances where you'll find one aren't just anywhere. There are certainly plenty such places in the universe, but not so many where we could actually see them and resolve the individual stars, which was a challenge even in this case.
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"And ZOMG, I got FP for the first time in my Slashdot career!"
Bitch
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Can you give me an example of an epoch of human history when there was not an "improvement in technology"?
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Silly AC. Yes, even in the "dark ages" mankind advanced technologically.
As anyone who has studied world or European history during the past half-century will tell you, the "dark ages" were anything but. It was actually a time of great advances in many human pursuits, especially in certain parts of the world. Ireland, for example, was a center of research and learning during what is mis-named by the ignorant the "dark ages". Also South Asia, also parts of the Middle East.
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...a game of looking for an extremely large needle in an infinite haystack.
I think I saw that porno once. It was almost as hot as this star.
Re:You think that's big!?!?!? (Score:5, Insightful)
No theories, but two hypotheses. One of which is actually based on modelling and thought, the other on intuition that the Universe is a big place.
You may be right, but because the Universe is such a big place I *don't* think it's likely to be broken soon, since it's bloody hard to look around. The Tarantula Nebula is nice because it's recent, dense and relatively close, which means this could be found. Of course, they're all relative terms. We've been looking at the Tarantula Nebula for at least 250 years, and we've only found this one now...
Re:You think that's big!?!?!? (Score:5, Funny)
>intuition that the Universe is a big place.
Dude, the universe is a big place. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the drug store, but that's just peanuts to the universe.
That's a big Twinkie (Score:2)
TSIA
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TSIA
I hate acronym abuse. Why can't people just speak fucking English? I mean, not even Google can decipher this post! Technology Services Industry Association? Twinkies? What the fuck are you waffling about?
Sheesh!
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Nah, it can't be that big, or else how could the multiverse host infinite universes?
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>intuition that the Universe is a big place.
Dude, the universe is a big place. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the drug store, but that's just peanuts to the universe.
"Dude?" "Drug store?" Please don't tell me they translated the Hitchhiker's Guide into American English!
Re:You think that's big!?!?!? (Score:5, Funny)
Now, where do I get my peanuts?
Depends on how ambitious you're feeling. If you'd prefer not to venture out into the vastness of space, I'd suggest checking between and under the couch cushions.
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Have you noticed that the distance from your house to the nearest drug store is constant but the distance back from the drug store changes vastly depending the prescription? Weird shit. Once it took me a week to even remember where I lived!
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One of which is actually based on modelling and thought
Except that the Eddington Limit was also based on modeling and thought, but was then smashed by reality.
2.5 years ago, astronomers with a spreadsheet "discovered" that the Milky Way is really 2x thicker than previously accepted.
While I'm glad that Science allows scientists to alter their theories and beliefs, ISTM that too many astronomers/cosmologists think they know far more than they really know.
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Except that the Eddington Limit was also based on modeling and thought, but was then smashed by reality.
Hardly "smashed" by reality - this is how real science works! Real science involves falsifiable hypotheses. If the hypothesis is good, you learn something useful even by finding exceptions. "Based on our best models this is as big as it gets - but wait, here's something interesting."
With good science, you admit that exceptions are interestng, and while your model usually makes accurate predictions, a fundamental assumption might just be wrong. Investigating the corner cases where usually-accurate models
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With junk science, you tweak your model
Isn't that what all modelers do on a regular basis?
to explain the new data too, and dismiss the exceptions as meaningless
I have a premonition...
This particular star is likely not an interesting exception
Did you just call yourself a junk scientist?
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"We think it's unlikely there will be any stars bigger than the Eddington limit"
"Ok we found one significantly bigger than the Eddington limit. Now we really think it's unlikely we'll find stars bigger than this one, really."
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Yep. Is there a bigger star out there? Almost certainly. Is there a bigger star out there where we have to ability to observe it? This is where it gets difficult.
Re:You think that's big!?!?!? (Score:4, Insightful)
We can't readily measure the size of stars across the whole universe, and you think that our likelihood of finding a star even closer to the Eddington limit is a slam-dunk? I think the guy who found this one has a pretty good idea how hard they are to come across.
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how many library of congress is that?
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Re:You think that's big!?!?!? (Score:4, Interesting)
Owing to the size of the universe, I think it is likely that this new record will be broken sometime soon.
The record is for the largest one found, not the largest one in the universe. These things are pretty difficult to find. They're all in dense clusters in active star forming regions. The cluster R136 is so dense that prior to the launch of HST we thought that there were fewer stars in it, but each of those stars would have been several hundred solar masses. HST was able to resolve those superstars into multiple smaller (50 solar mass) stars. Except for this one, apparently.
We haven't found any equivalent star clusters in the Milkyway (yet). It's possible there aren't any. Maybe something about the composition or dynamics of Galactic gas prevents such large stars from forming. No other galaxy would be close enough that we could resolve cluster into individual stars. The SMC doesn't have active star formation. So we're stuck with the LMC as a target for finding a larger star. There's no other cluster in the LMC like R136, so to break this record we'd probably need to find a larger star in the same cluster. Or we would need to find out that R136a1 is a multiple star system containing 2 or more smaller stars rather than one star of 265 solar masses.
As far as how significant this is... I'm sure it will drive star formation theorists nuts trying to build stars that big in a cluster environment. But as a find, in and of itself, they looked for a really huge star in what is well known as the only place you're going to possibly find a really huge star. It seems kind of like "discovering" a route from your front door to the bus stop when you know where both of them are. Given how many people are interested in star forming regions, I'm kind of wondering why nobody did it earlier. I may have to read the paper to see if some interesting or difficult technique was necessary.
Original Journal Article (Score:3, Informative)
Here is a posting [sciencemag.org] on Science Magazine's ScienceNow, and here is the original journal article [eso.org] originally published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomy Society. I think it is always better, when possible to refer to original sources when talking about scientific issues. Scientific discussions can become muddled when translated by journalists.
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You makee mistakee.
It's somewhat certain that there are stars larger than this one, even if they're wayyyyyyy out on the long tail of the distribution, which itself drops off like a cliff somewhere beyond this one due to the nonlinearity of the processes occurring in larger stars (they tend to explode-implode into your darker dwarves and holes).
But it's also almost certain that we won't detect one of them for a long time, since, as you nearly pointed out, astronomy budgets are somewhat wee compared to the s
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"Owing to the rarity of these monsters, I think it is unlikely that this new record will be broken any time soon.""
Owing to the size of the universe, I think it is likely that this new record will be broken sometime soon.
Two theories, now let's sit back and see who's right!
Science would be a lot more fun if scientists solved disputes with death matches.
Pretty cool but... (Score:4, Funny)
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The only way we'll find a larger star is if you mom auditions for American Idol.
Re:Pretty cool but... (Score:4, Funny)
Is this the joke thread? Ok, here's mine...
Twinkle, twinkle, really freaking big star...
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Wake me up when they find the smallest one!
Look in your boyfriend's pants, ma'am.
I guess it's time to update the earth to star (Score:2)
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Just you wait until some committee somewhere out there decides that the sun is too small and inconsequential to be classed as a real star. If it happened to Pluto...
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Sentence fragments are really
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R136a1 or Rieshai (Score:2)
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Which would be (rather bad) German and could be translated as "wet meadow shark" (even though the term "Ries" for a wet, grassy plain is not often used in contemporary German).
Unhealthy Universe? (Score:5, Funny)
Clearly obesity is not just a problem on earth.
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I was waiting for a CowboyNeal joke on this...
Mass vs Radius (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's blue, therefore it's hot, therefore it's dense, therefore it's (comparatively) small. VY Canis Majoris would be much larger, even if not so massive - and cooler, and therefore red. Indeed, notice the diagram i
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Here is the link to the original paper. [eso.org]
not unlikely to be broken (Score:2)
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The thing about records is...
They are not really records until they are recorded.
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Recorded by who?
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The record keeper.
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If a really freakin' huge star is created in the universe and no one is around to observe it, does it break a record?
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If a really freakin' huge star is created in the universe and no one is around to observe it, does it break a record?
That one's easy, as there are no unrecorded records, by definition. The real question is, lacking any observation, does it even exist, or does it just probably exist, or "exist" in an undetermined state until observed? And what counts as "observation"?
Temperature on the surface of Sol (Score:4, Informative)
For anyone curious, as I was, what the surface temperature of our star is: 5500 degrees C
My source was NASA's world book page [nasa.gov] (then again, it goes on to state that our solar system has nine planets, so trust NASA at your own risk)
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Re:Temperature on the surface of Sol (Score:5, Informative)
For anyone curious, as I was, what the surface temperature of our star is: 5500 degrees C
Which you can derive from noting the Sun's yellow color (approximately 570–590 nm) and applying Planck's Law [wikipedia.org] or Wein's Displacement Law [wikipedia.org] in reverse. Note that this pic [wikipedia.org] shows the 5500 degree C peak aligns well with 500-600 nm.
From the Wein's Displacement article:
" * The surface temperature (or more correctly, the effective temperature) of the Sun is 5778 K. Using Wien's law, this temperature corresponds to a peak emission at a wavelength of 2.89777 million nm K/ 5778 K = 502 nm = about 5000 Å. This wavelength is fairly in the middle of the most sensitive part of land animal visual spectrum acuity. Even nocturnal and twilight-hunting animals must sense light from the waning day and from the moon, which is reflected sunlight with this same wavelength distribution. Also, the average wavelength of starlight maximal power is in this region, due to the sun being in the middle of a common temperature range of stars.
[See for example the article color, because of the spread resulting in white light. Due to the Rayleigh scattering of blue light by the atmosphere this white light is separated somewhat, resulting in a blue sky and a yellow sun]."
[Emphasis mine]
See also:
http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2002/TahirAhmed.shtml [hypertextbook.com]
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Much ado over Pluto (OT) (Score:4, Insightful)
then again, it goes on to state that our solar system has nine planets, so trust NASA at your own risk
Argh, this nonsense again. The IAU dropped the ball and we remain without an adequate definition of what a planet is. "Clearing the neighborhood" remains undefined and there are ways to define "neighborhood", as a large loci in space-time around the trajectory of the object in question, so that Pluto, and perhaps even Ceres and some of the dwarf planet candidates, clear their neighborhoods. The point here is that while a considerable number of astronomers intend a particular definition of "neighborhood" (as a spherical shell around the Sun), that definition has not been adopted nor, I might add, does it seem all that useful.
Semantically, it's also a mess since we have "minor planets" and now "dwarf planets" which are not "planets". Also, it just confuses the issue for the billions of people who were taught for decades that Pluto was a planet. I find the redefinition of "planet" to be inconsiderate of their needs and as a result rather frivilous abuse of IAU's power. Just because we had a similar screw up back when Ceres was demoted as a planet, doesn't mean that we need to repeat this error.
Finally, this definition only applies to the Solar System. We'd have enormous difficult applying this definition anywhere else. It would be hard and time consuming to verify the dynamics of other star systems in enough detail to distinguish between planets and dwarf planets using such a definition. And those systems may have orbital dynamics that are far different from the nearly circular orbits of planets in the Solar System.
Personally, I have no problems with eight, nine, or hundreds of planets. But I think it reasonable that the definition of planet have a scientific basis. That bit is the common view I share with the people who came up with the current definition. But I think it's been an embarrassment to come up with the current weak and unuseful definition and then attempt to sell it as being scientific (remember the old definition happens to be much more well-defined and hence, scientific than the new one, people were just concerned about the growing number of objects that would be considered planets).
Personally, I find it more credible that we're just seeing a continuation (in intellectually mutated form) of the old, irrational opposition to Pluto's original naming. Its first two letters, "P" and "L" happen to be, either by coincidence or artifice, the initials of Percival Lowell, the man who had established and funded the observatory that discovered Pluto.
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"Clearing the neighborhood" remains undefined and there are ways to define "neighborhood", as a large loci in space-time around the trajectory of the object in question, so that Pluto, and perhaps even Ceres and some of the dwarf planet candidates, clear their neighborhoods.
You have a fair point that the definition of "neighborhood" is vague, but all sensible attempts at least refer to the entire orbit and not just the immediate vicinity of the planet. By that standard, vagueness notwithstanding, it is obv
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Thanks for the wonderful example of the irrationality that surrounds this particular debate.
For background, I'm a mathematician. Defining things precisely is one of the things I do. I also have a somewhat compulsive behavior. So yes, the IAU redefinition really ticks me off in an irrational corner of my mind. But it also was a rather cavalier thing to do to the public especially when coupled with the subsequent condescending lectures on the philosophy of science (which were wholly irrelevant to the action). As I see it, here's the argument for the current IAU definition: "We had to change the defi
I was already impressed by VY Cannis Majoris... (Score:2)
... a star so large if you swapped it with our sun it's surface would extend past Saturn's orbit.
Anonymous Coward (Score:5, Informative)
I puzzled over this for a bit too, but this newly discovered star is the most massive discovered. The largest known star in terms of size is still VY Canis Majoris at ~2000 solar radii, but only ~20 times the mass of the Sun.
Re:Anonymous Coward (Score:4, Interesting)
Well yeah, the first line of the summary says "most massive", which in astronomy is usually (usually) what "biggest" means.
Though it is admittedly ambiguous. I was watching Jeopardy (a taped episode a friend of mine was in and *won*) and one of the answers was "It's the biggest planet after Jupiter and Saturn", and the correct question was "Neptune?" (the 3rd most massive) but the contestant questioned "Uranus?" (3rd largest diameter). The judges ended up accepting it due to the ambiguity of the question.
And I know that I personally consider the Jeopardy judges to be the ultimate authority on when something is ambiguous and multiple interpretations are valid!
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I edited for brevity. Though I think it would be funny if simply giving the "answer" with an upturned inflection was sufficient.
Yo momma so fat ... (Score:5, Funny)
Link to research paper (arxiv) (Score:5, Informative)
VY Canis Majoris (Score:4, Interesting)
The article states that R136a1 is 265 solar masses, however it doesn't say how big it is.
VY Canis Majoris is 2,100 times the size of the sun, and 230,000 times the size of Earth. It is so huge, that if it occupied the centre of our solar system, its boundaries would be Saturn's orbit.
If R136a1 is the heaviest star, then it must be considerably more dense than VY Canis Majoris, but I find the latter to be far more impressive.
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Scientists are late. (Score:2)
So these stars are Orkans? (Score:2)
"Unlike humans, these stars are born heavy and lose weight as they age,"
If I get burned to death by Johnathan Winters I'm going to be PISSED!
Why isn't it... (Score:2)
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Can we watch it die? (Score:2)
The more massive the star, the shorter its life as it burns through its fuel more quickly.
Stars smaller than the sun are believed to endure for hundreds of billions or even trillions of years.
Stars of near the suns size last for billions to tens of billions of years.
Large stars are believed to last for tens or hundreds of millions of years.
The largest previously known stars at up to a hundred times the suns mass are believed to live for only a few hundred thousand or million years.
How long will this star la
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I'm no expert by any means but here are some numbers I pulled out of...Google. By extrapolating from what this guy says [nasa.gov] I get an answer of about only 750,000 years and judging by what else I've read that number is probably very low. Not that long on the cosmic scale but a little longer than you or I will be around for.
Ten million times brighter than the Sun? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Ten million times brighter than the Sun? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm guessing that what it probably means is that this star is estimated at having ten million times the power output compared to the Sun. Therefore, at some fixed reference distance, it would deliver ten million times more watts of illumination per square meter. This doesn't mean that the surface brightness is ten million times greater than that of the Sun, because some of the brightness comes from the greater size of the star. If you make a lamp with one hundred light bulbs, they are not individually brighter than a single light bulb, but as an aggregate, they provide more illumination, and can be more easily seen from farther away.
what does 265 solar masses mean? (Score:3, Funny)
I need that in units I can comprehend:
The mass of the sun is 1.99x10^30kg. The average mass of a book is 340g. There are 21,814,555 books cataloged by the Library of Congress. So, 265 solar masses * 1.99x10^30kg/solar mass * 1000g/kg / 340g/book / 21,814,555 books/LoC = 7.1x10^25LoC. Therefore, the new star is equivalent in mass to 71YLoC (yotta Libraries Of Congress). Wow, that's a big star!
Oh noes, 265! (Score:2, Funny)
"Unlike humans ..." (Score:4, Insightful)
From article: "Unlike humans, these stars are born heavy and lose weight as they age," Crowther said.
This is obviously wrong. Some humans are plump when young, and turn into skeletons as they age.
In fact, this is commonly observed among those humans who, ironically, are called ``stars''.
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The gp didn't refer to plumpness, he referred to weight. Those old skeletons still weigh more than infants.
Meh. (Score:2)
Scientsist Discover Biggest Star... (Score:2)
Scientsist Discover Biggest Star : Kirstie Alley.
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Biggest Star (Score:2)
is it really that massive? (Score:2)
I've read numerous articles in the past dealing with supermassive stars and as often as not, the largest stars turn out to be binaries, i.e. what they thought was a 300 solar mass star was simply two 150 solar mass stars. However, I read the paper on arxiv (http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1007/1007.3284v1.pdf) and it appears that the scientists have ruled that out. The thinking is that if it was actually two unresolved stars revolving around each other, their stellar winds would collide and produce x-
"Very Large Telescope" (Score:2)
Beautiful.
An accurate and descriptive term.
Anything else would detract from the truth--something simply is what it is.
We must get sales and marketing involved for the next one, though!
We need a snappy name--something that really pops--for several of them working together, perhaps arranged in some sort of an array?
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I Agree. R136a1 is hardly a good name for one of the biggest.
My girlfriend suggested Prometheus for the big one.
Maybe 'the four horsemen' ?
What about dark matter stars? (Score:2)
It seems to me that this Eddington limit idea depends on all the matter that's gravitationally bound to the star's atmosphere participate in the fusion reactions at the core of the star. What about matter that doesn't participate in those kinds of reactions? Wouldn't a preponderance of dark matter allow a star to form that's much bigger than the Eddington limit since the dark matter wouldn't be participating in energy releasing fusion reactions?
And why isn't it possible that this star is one such?
Binary star? (Score:2)
I'm curious, does anyone know how/if they can tell it's not a binary star system, i.e. two stars that are each below the Eddington limit?
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LOL SCIENCE IS HARD. They got it wrong, that means I'm right!
Nobody says its a fact except the idiot journalists who write about it, and the idiots like you who believe the journalists. Just an FYI.
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I have heard scientists come out and make wide and absolute proclamations that really don't seem to be based on much more than known observances. There is just so much we don't really know yet.
At the same time, the evening news, that runs 4 hours, seems to be too busy reporting on the latest celebrity and sport star gossip to give any scientific press release more than 30 seconds. So much is lost in this sound bite society.
I do wonder about where the c
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I may be wrong, but I don't believe the article even suggests the Eddington limit is wrong, even now. The Eddington limit seems to say that when a star exceeds a certain mass, the amount of energy radiated from the star becomes so great that the star will begin gradually losing mass (absent some other source of additional mass being added to the star, such as the star merging with another star), until it reaches the Eddington limit, then it might attain a sort of equilibrium.
From my reading of the article,