Persistent Storm Detected On Low-Mass Star (latimes.com) 39
The L.A. Times reports that researchers using the Kepler and Spitzer space telescopes have discovered an astronomical first: a low-mass star with a huge, persistent, swirling surface feature akin to the long-lived storm on Jupiter. The star, W1906+40 , is cool enough ("a mere 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit or so") to allow cloud formation. A slice:
This star was first spotted by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (or WISE) in 2011; study leader John Gizis of the University of Delaware, Newark and colleagues then looked through NASA's Kepler data to further examine the star. (It just so happened that Kepler was pointing in the right direction to spot the L-dwarf.) ... "The long life of the cloud is in contrast with weather changes seen in cooler brown dwarfs on the timescale of hours and days," they wrote.
In fact, the researchers believe the storm has been going strong for at least two years — a stability they seemed to find slightly baffling.
"Evidently the W1906+40 spot is very long-lived compared to the 'weather' features in cooler L and T dwarfs," they wrote. "Why would the clouds in W1906+40 be stable?"
familiar (Score:3)
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Even post Dice slashdot isn't immune to dupes I guess:
http://science.slashdot.org/st... [slashdot.org]
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A dupe or a derp?
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No one is going hungry because of the space program. 0.5% of federal budget. We spend over twice that on the Homeland Security gestapo which thus far has netted zero benefit
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my hope is that the republican establishment leaders meat with donald trump at trump tower and the BS grows so massive that it collapses in on itself and forms a new star.
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My understanding is they intend to "meat" with him in less than one seventh of a fortnight.
Re: This is Republican-style... (Score:1)
ISS? Why that's just one letter away from ISIS. NASA are funding the terrorists! We should cut all their funding and giv it to Donald Trump, derp derp!
Climate Change (Score:2)
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And it will create jobs, too.
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we're talking about maybe five pixels on a CCD array, so here's your picture +
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It's not possible to take pictures, but variations in emission can be analyzed and matched to known objects like Jupiter to allow for most likely explanation.
It's not a perfect solution, but the best we have today.
Now back to the drawingboard to try to figure out how to make a probe that can have warp drive capability.
Wish we could image it. (Score:3)
Sure, there's some long-baseline interferometry happening on Earth's surface, but I'd love to see imagers with a baseline spanning an AU or so.
3,500 degrees Fahrenheit (Score:2)
Who still measures things like this in Fahrenheit ? Come on - admit that you are in the 21st century - that should have been (about) 1925 Celsius or 2200 Kelvin
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They still use Fahrenheit in the world of Oz
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I might use Fahrenheit to describe how warm my living room is, but for a star, a scientific measurement, -- Centigrade or Kelvin has been the unit for many years.
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This isn't a scientific journal, this is a science article for the popular press. So they use units that the average reader of an American magazine will be most familiar with.
In other words, chill....
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Yeah, but then again, I doubt many readers are actually familiar with the difference between 2000 degrees and 3500 degrees in either unit system. Chemists and metallurgists could nail it down pretty well -- hot enough to melt anything except carbon, but not to boil most of the interesting stuff beyond lead or zinc -- but, again, it would be lost on most readers.
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It's a virtual world so it doesn't count.