Star Within a Star: Thorne-Zytkow Object Discovered 89
astroengine writes: "A weird type of 'hybrid' star has been discovered nearly 40 years since it was first theorized — but until now has been curiously difficult to find. In 1975, renowned astrophysicists Kip Thorne, of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, Calif., and Anna Zytkow, of the University of Cambridge, UK, assembled a theory on how a large dying star could swallow its neutron star binary partner, thus becoming a very rare type of stellar hybrid, nicknamed a Thorne-Zytkow object (or TZO). The neutron star — a dense husk of degenerate matter that was once a massive star long since gone supernova — would spiral into the red supergiant's core, interrupting normal fusion processes. According to the Thorne-Zytkow theory, after the two objects have merged, an excess of the elements rubidium, lithium and molybdenum will be generated by the hybrid. So astronomers have been on the lookout for stars in our galaxy, which is thought to contain only a few dozen of these objects at any one time, with this specific chemical signature in their atmospheres. Now, according to Emily Levesque of the University of Colorado Boulder and her team, a bona fide TZO has been discovered and their findings have been accepted for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters."
Re:Fucking ads (Score:5, Insightful)
Ads? What ads?
-- Happy AdBlock Plus user.
Did they try putting an ad within an ad on this article about a star within a star?
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Does this work? I haven't bothered with AdBlock before, but this Slashdot site is getting pretty unreadable. There's the click close at the bottom of every screen to prevent the ad from covering 2/3 of the screen. The auto-play video that ties up limited bandwidth and prevents screen-scrolling. Now this shunt to ad-video page and wait for Slashdot to load bullshit. I was thinking of quitting... I've read Slashdot for a long time, but this is getting unusable.
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I use ABP regularly - I didn't even realise that ads were used on slashdot
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...yo dawg, I heard you like ads...
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I think they're experimenting with adblock countermeasures.
I mean, the other day for one story I got bullshit ads. this is despite me using the "classic" mode(that goes to a different page for making a reply etc) - and despite using abp - and despite having "ads disabled" checkbox checked.
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Did they try putting an ad within an ad on this article about a star within a star?
If they did, they would earn an exception filter in AdBlock from me.
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I used to think adblock was unnecessary back when google was doing the whole "unobtrusive text ad" thing, and I saw a future with hope for ads being reasonable things. But it's been years since that was worth worrying about.
Marketers haven't learned that their obnoxiousness is a tragedy of the commons thing, and upping that factor to compete just quietly hurts the marketplace as a whole.
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Rob malda would be spinning in his grave but the existence of beta and the new slashdot would never afford him the posibility of resting in peace.
I stuck around after most of the intelligent people left, I even stuck around after the stories dropped about 30-40 iq points to
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Can't read anything because can't turn off ads anymore.
Just a basic HOSTS file works unless your just out to complain.
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Yo Dawg (Score:4, Funny)
Nuff' said.
Re:Yo Dawg (Score:5, Funny)
I'm eagerly awaiting the day when all communication on the internet can be done either via cat pictures or quoting memes
we're getting closer and closer.
As requested (Score:2)
I'm eagerly awaiting the day when all communication on the internet can be done either via cat pictures or quoting memes
we're getting closer and closer.
You're welcome. [imgur.com]
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Isn't actually making the meme-image pretty superfluous in this case?
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Isn't actually making the meme-image pretty superfluous in this case?
Unfortunately, given that the original "Yo Dawg" was marked as "offtopic" by twice as many people as thought it was funny, it probably *is* necessary.
Shame, as the minimalism of the original poster's joke worked- for me- because it assumed that most of us were familiar with a long-established meme to be able to dispense with the full text (i.e. playing off its clichedness rather than it being a boring rehash of a now-tired cliche) and also that we were smart enough to figure out its relevance to the headl
Re:Yo Dawg (Score:5, Interesting)
Hate to turn something funny into a serious note, but I'm pretty sure a lot (if not most) of the comments on the internet can already be predicted just by looking at the headline.
I suggest calculating an originality score for all comments based on their similarity to all previous comments. If it could be based on all the comments you've personally encountered before, it would drastically cut down on the 'Oh god, not this bullshit again'-feeling we all have when perusing comment sections.
On the other hand, sometimes you predict that a certain comment will have been made and feel satisfaction upon reading it.
Maybe that's a bad thing, too.
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Hate to turn something funny into a serious note, but I'm pretty sure a lot (if not most) of the comments on the internet can already be predicted just by looking at the headline.
So I guess "I, for one, welcome our star-eating star overlords" is right out?
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Although, yes, this one can be easily predicted, it does seem fairly unique: https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com]
Which brings up the point where the implementation gets tricky. When it comes to structure and the words used it is very unoriginal, but as a whole it is very original. Perhaps naive approaches to detecting the originality of a piece of text would do more harm then good. I guess it all comes down to waiting for AI that can sufficiently understand text to determine a useful originality score.
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Ideally for me, a reference will be made as merely a humorous hook to a serious
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I'm eagerly the day when all communication on the internet can be done either via cat pictures or quoting memes
we're getting closer and closer.
FTFY. Such meta.
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what you're looking for is called "reddit"
On the bright side (Score:1)
Re:within? (Score:4, Informative)
The star in question is a ball gravitationally bound of gas that has a reasonably well defined perimeter, with a neutron star (a ball of also gravitationally bound degenerate matter) orbiting it at some distance.
The neutron star which was orbiting the other star, is now (due to the first star expanding as it transitions to the red giant stage) within the perimeter of the first star.
So in other words: the same damn definition of "inside" you use for things in every day life, what's to not understand?
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Don't worry, you'll be able to understand simple concepts again when the LSD wears off. Until then there must be more interesting things than posting on slashdot for you to do!
Spoken like someone who has never taken LSD.
Re:within? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: within? (Score:4, Informative)
Imagine you are just standing there and then WHAM! a very large soap bubble slams in to you and all of a sudden you are inside the bubble and the bubble happened to close in around you without popping. You are now inside the bubble and you are still a distinguishable unit of matter detectable from the bubble you're now inside.
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I'll answer you without sarcasm.
Stars have pretty well defined life cycles. They go from A to B to C etc.
Their life cycle is determined by how heavy they are (among a few other facts).
This star within a star, is a star with a core that has a composition that doesn't exist, unless you grab one star; and put it into another.
In other words; if the other star didn't fall into and get fully absorbed by the larger star; it would never exist. Therefore, it is a Star in a Star.
But; you knew that already and were
Neutron star, or? (Score:5, Funny)
"a dense husk of degenerate matter"
Sounds like the average slashdotter. *rimshot*
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Nerds are supposed to be self-loathing.
But reddit is a gigantic blight on the internet and and I'm pro-shitting all over them, anytime.
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no we are not.. Self loathing is a pop culture bullshit.,
and reddit is one of the more sane places on the internet. I have had far more sane and rational discussion on science topics there then on slashdot by a long shot.
Checklist (Score:1)
Mkay, where is the checklist of theorized star types yet to be discovered?
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I dunno, but if these things can form by having an envelope expand to capture a neutron star without the neutron star gathering enough mass and making it to the core without collapsing into a black hole... now I'm wondering how long it takes a black hole to devour a red giant from the inside out. Might be longer than the star's expected to remain in the red giant state, for the same reason the neutron star stays mostly undisturbed
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Don't think Wikipedia is going to get their citation... does seem odd a black hole first then a supernova.
If their combined mass exceeds the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit then the two will collapse into a black hole, resulting in a supernova that disperses the outer layers of the star. Otherwise, the two will coalesce into a single neutron star.[citation needed] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T... [wikipedia.org]–ytkow_object
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Lithium (Score:4, Funny)
" an excess of the elements rubidium, lithium and molybdenum will be generated by the hybrid."
Just what we need, a hybrid that makes Lithium
Nothing New (Score:4, Funny)
This "Star within a star" thing has been a phenomenon commonly known in Hollywood since the days Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks.
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This "Star within a star" thing has been a phenomenon commonly known in Hollywood since the days Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks.
Sweet little Mary Pickford would NEVER do such a thing!
Our Universe is Awesome (Score:5, Insightful)
A place so big and fantastic where anything that is theoretically possible has probably happened hundreds or thousands, if not millions, of times.
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I guess that means an honest politician is not even theoretically possible.
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Actually I think honest politicians are probably fairly common. But as in everything, they start small, and locally, and as such things go, we, the voters, eliminated them from the race early on in favor of the politicians that tell us what we want to hear instead of what we need to hear. The result is that the longer lived politicians, are electorally selected to favour those who tell the electorate things that have little relation to reality as opposed to the electorate's fantasy. We really shouldn't com
Next step (Score:2)
Mine it for batteries!
Husk? Neutron star is the opposite (Score:5, Interesting)
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No. Pit doesn't really work, the entire star is still there, it's just been crushed unimaginably small.
I believe the saying goes, one teaspoon of matter from a neutron star would be more mass than the entire earth. One teaspoon.
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Technically, much of the star's mass is lost when it goes supernova, so part of the original star is lost and is therefore not part of the neutron star. So, pit would be a somewhat better descriptor than husk.
Also, I've heard that a teaspoon of matter would be more mass than Manhattan Island. Wikipedia's "Neutron Star" article says, "a neutron star is so dense that one teaspoon (5 milliliters) of its material would have a mass over 5.5Ã--1012 kg (that is 1100 tonnes per 1 nanolitre), about 900 times
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Reminds me of that err documentary I saw once where they explain about Dark Matter : A pound of it weighs over ten thousand pounds !
one teaspoon (5 milliliters) (Score:2)
I am glad you converted that to metric because obviously a teaspoon can't hold any visible amount of neutronium, its not strong enough.
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1 teaspoon is about 5 ml (0.00000493 m^3), while the mass of the Earth is about 6e+24 kg (5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg). If you compressed the Earth down to the volume of a teaspoon it would have a mass of 1.2e+30 kg/m^3, while a neutron star is at most only 6e+17 kg/m^3.
So one Earth mass is actually 2 trillion teaspoons of neutron star, which is 1e+7 m^3, or a 200m cube of neutron star. Still, a teaspoon of neutron star has a mass of 3 trillion kg, which is about the mass of a mountain. That's stil
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"when it fell back down it would make a new hole, eventually turning the Earth into Swiss cheese"
I think the molten rock would fill in the holes pretty quick
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Jury is still out... (Score:1)
It's important to keep in mind that this is the identification of a Thorne-Zytkow *candidate*. Further study will be needed to confirm whether this is a genuine T-Z object or not - as it is actually quite difficult to tell. In terms of luminosity and temperature, such an object would appear quite similar to a normal red supergiant. The key observational clue is a peculiar abundance of Li, along with some other elements such as Rb. The authors see some of these elements in spectra they have taken, but others
Yo dawg (Score:2)
I herd you like stars, so I put a star in your star so you can fusion while you fusion.
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It had to be said. Now it's out of the way at least.
Apologies to Tom Lehrer (Score:4, Funny)
rubidium, lithium and molybdenum
And strontium and silicon and silver and samarium and bismuth, bromine, helium, beryllium and barium. These are the only ones of which the news has come to Harvard--there may be many many but they haven't been discovered.
Neutron star? Degenerate matter? (Score:2)
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Um.. I thought a neutron star was mainly neutronium, with a layer of degenerate matter on top of that, and maybe a layer of normal matter on top of that?
Neutronium is just one type of degenerate matter.
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Then why do we have a word to differentiate them?
Differentiate what from what?
The matter white dwarfs, neutron stars, and black holes composed of are fairly different from the matter we normally encounter day-to-day, and yet they're not identical to each other. In the last case we can't really be sure what it is like, lacking a well-supported theory of quantum gravity.
LMC (Score:1)
Happens to be outside our galaxy.
Just saying.
oh my! (Score:1)
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