On Second Thought, Polaris Really Does Seem 434 Light Years Away 75
sciencehabit writes with this excerpt from Science Magazine "Last November, astronomer David Turner made headlines by claiming that one of the sky's best known objects—the North Star, Polaris—was actually 111 light-years closer than thought. If true, the finding might have forced researchers to rethink how they calculate distances in the cosmos as well as what they know about some aspects of stellar physics. But a new study argues that distance measurements of the familiar star made some 2 decades ago by the European Space Agency's venerable Hipparcos satellite are still spot on."
Re:HOW LONG AT WARP 10 ?? (Score:4, Funny)
Oddly enough, the old Russian maxim applies here. One does not travel at warp, warp travels you.
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Yes, because you see, these go to 11!
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Warp 11 is 1331 times the speed of light.
So around 3 months.
Ooops! (Score:2, Funny)
Looks like another mixup between metric and imperial measurement systems. /jk
Alas... (Score:5, Funny)
...eleventy-one light years is far too short a distance to travel among such excellent and admirable stellar phenomena.
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The most important question... (Score:1)
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that pissed me off so much, universe was actually getting quite good....Someone needs to invest in a real scifi network that only show...oh i dunno....science fiction?
A good starting lineup would be stargate, a star wars tv series, A reboot of firefly, and some good old fashioned early 90's anime....
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Someone needs to invest in a real scifi network that only show...oh i dunno....science fiction?
A good starting lineup would be stargate, a star wars tv series, A reboot of firefly, and some good old fashioned early 90's anime....
Buffy in Space never belonged on SciFi - it should have been on a premium channel, so they could have shown all the sex they and the audience wanted.
There are TV channels for anime too, at least where I live.
That said, The Channel Formerly Known as SciFi has fallen far indeed. It used to be my starting channel on the TV. Now I prefer the fscking Travel Channel and the mangled rerun channel (a.k.a. BBC America).
Re:The most important question... (Score:5, Funny)
Dude if you wat Science Fiction, check out the History channel. Every single show is about aliens in one way or another.
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People are getting disappointed with science fiction. We are already in the BTTF future, and there is no flying cars, we are finally getting a hint on how hard is to get out of our solar system, much more to get to another star, and the most accurate sci-fi predictions are dystopias like 1984 or disaster films.
At least Syfy is not as bad as History Channel, they got Continuum after all.
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that pissed me off so much, universe was actually getting quite good....Someone needs to invest in a real scifi network that only show...oh i dunno....science fiction?
A good starting lineup would be stargate, a star wars tv series, A reboot of firefly, and some good old fashioned early 90's anime....
I think many SciFi and Anime fans have gotten to the point where they just download or stream or buy DVDs/BluRays (or some combination of the 3) of things they want to watch, which is why I don't think a new SciFi network could be successful. The consumers have moved on to other media.
That said, I wonder why SciFi producers in the west haven't tried to copy the OVA model used by some in the Anime Industry, where some Anime goes direct to DVD. They wouldn't have to deal with having to get their show on a net
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SG-1 was on Showtime until season 5.
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Good riddance, I say. (Score:4, Funny)
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A counter-argument... so? (Score:2)
It still doesn't mean that Turner is wrong. Remember Piltdown Man? Even people who are committed to science sometimes still get it terribly wrong.
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Re:A counter-argument... so? (Score:5, Informative)
Does this discrepancy only exist for Polaris? Do all other stars give the same results for both measurement methods?
Short read. [wikipedia.org]
You'd think making Hubble take an accurate bead on the thing on Dec. 31 and Jul. 1, then comparing the two readings to triangulate would be all that's needed (basic geometry); nuh uh. How about Type 1a supernovae which ought to all be the same luminosity, or Cepheid Variables, ditto.
Nope. It's not that easy. Fun problem.
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I'd like to know. I can't answer it, but I hope others can eventually.
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Polaris is the easiest to measure. Anything off axis from our tilt takes a lot more work to measure and get right
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However, Polaris would show the most diurnal parallax, as that is indeed based on the earth's spin.
Re:A counter-argument... so? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, that's why we call it science. If it were never wrong, it would be religion.
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Which of course is exactly why I mentioned the Piltdown Man fiasco, because for some of the people involved science had become a religion. They were too emotionally invested in a particular fact or discovery. It certainly was not the first nor last example of that.
Re:A counter-argument... so? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I think that last weakness is common to any distributed system. As long as intellectual inquiry must be distributed among many people (because you don't have time to rediscover everything yourself), you have to assume that the journalists are acting in good faith
Lanney Kekua (Score:2)
Who is implicated in the Lanney Kekua scam?
Is Mr. Mani Te'o innocent in all of this. That he lied about meeting Ms. Kekua so his dad and others wouldn't think less of him for being head-over-heels for a virtual girlfriend?
Does the set of geek dudes who are too shy to have a real girl friend intersect the set of star college football players?
If Mani's musician-dude friend is behind the thing, does the musician have a serious man-crush on Mr. Te'o?
Forget the parallax o
Metric Mixup (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Metric Mixup (Score:5, Funny)
The Imperial system uses light fortnights (3.62628957 * 10^14 m), whereas the metric system uses light megaseconds (2.99792458 * 10^14 m).
One light year contains 31.536 light megaseconds, but only 26.07 light fortnights.
:-P
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As far as I know, everybody uses Parsecs [wikipedia.org]. 1 pc = 648000 / PI * 149597870700 m ~= 3.0856775814913676 * 10^16 m.
There are those who argue that Imperial Parsecs measure time.
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How many wax candles is that?
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To be specific one of the systems have a single arbitrary unit and loads of other units derived from it and the other system went all out and decided that all units should be arbitrary.
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American Light years are BIGGER, but slower, and usually dont have enough gas mileage to get there.
Holy crap, that does explain the difference!
Confusion (Score:2)
Man, I'm glad I was sitting
They're both right. (Score:5, Funny)
The Polarans solved FTL travel ages ago, and now use it to troll other civilisations by placing their star along some life-bearing planet's axis of rotation, waiting for people to develop advanced astronomy, then randomly feinting at them to mess with the scientists' heads.
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The Polarans solved FTL travel ages ago, and now use it to troll other civilisations by placing their star along some life-bearing planet's axis of rotation, waiting for people to develop advanced astronomy, then randomly feinting at them to mess with the scientists' heads.
Applying Occam's Razor to the question, you are almost certainly correct.
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If this were Reddit, you'd have Reddit Gold right now. Priceless. :-)
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I figured a ship using a warp drive simply got in the way of the scientists making the measurement, throwing off their calculation with the distorted space-time.
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Yes, you will utterly love 4chan....
http://boards.4chan.org/sci/ [4chan.org]
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rename it to "stella endermanis"
It's so very lonely (Score:2)
It's 1000 light years from home.
Strange methods (Score:4, Interesting)
Reading up, it turnes out the whole argumentation is exactly the other way round than I would hav eexpected.
You can meassure the distance of stars in multiple ways, most depend on assumptions that can be pretty hard to get right. There is ONE way, though, to accurately determine the distance:
By simple geometry. If you observe the star 6 months apart, you get a trianble with a base of 2AU, which is enough accurately triangulate the distance of stars up to a some 100 ly away.
This was exactly the method used 2 decade ago.
Not this new guy used a very indirect way (measuring the brightness we see the star, guessing its real brightness by looking at spectra and then deciding how far away it must have been), gets a 30% different number and claims his, indirect and error-laden, way is yielding the more correct of the results.
Tard.
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A couple millon.
But with stars being point sources, with a telescope you can determine shifts of the center of brightness between stars very very accurately, especially with a sat telescope outside the atmosphere.
There ARE, of course limits, and the method becomes useless for stars many 1000 ly away (in the sense that the indirect methods, despite all their error possibilities, become more accurate), but 400ly is still doable.
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About 27 million give or take. 1 AU is ~8.3 light minutes, 525949 minutes per year, 434 years.
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By simple geometry. If you observe the star 6 months apart, you get a trianble with a base of 2AU, which is enough accurately triangulate the distance of stars up to a some 100 ly away.
This was exactly the method used 2 decade ago.
Not this new guy used a very indirect way (measuring the brightness we see the star, guessing its real brightness by looking at spectra and then deciding how far away it must have been), gets a 30% different number and claims his, indirect and error-laden, way is yielding the more correct of the results.
So, by your own words, Polaris is too far away to use triangulation. Yet, you insist that's the correct method for finding it's distance. Then end off by calling the guy names.
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By simple geometry. If you observe the star 6 months apart, you get a trianble with a base of 2AU, which is enough accurately triangulate the distance of stars up to a some 100 ly away.
This was exactly the method used 2 decade ago.
Not this new guy used a very indirect way (measuring the brightness we see the star, guessing its real brightness by looking at spectra and then deciding how far away it must have been), gets a 30% different number and claims his, indirect and error-laden, way is yielding the more correct of the results.
So, by your own words, Polaris is too far away to use triangulation. Yet, you insist that's the correct method for finding it's distance. Then end off by calling the guy names.
Depends on what he means by "accurately". Certainly not the "off by 25%" the new guy is claiming.