Astronomers Discover Giant Ancient Stars in Milky Way (theguardian.com) 25
Astronomers have discovered a mysterious group of giant elderly stars at the heart of the Milky Way that are emitting solar system-sized clouds of dust and gas. The stars, which have been named "old smokers," sat quietly for many years, fading almost to invisibility, before suddenly puffing out vast clouds of smoke. The discovery was made during the monitoring of almost a billion stars in infrared light during a 10-year survey of the night sky. The Guardian: The astronomers had set out to capture rarely seen newborn stars -- known as protostars -- while undergoing the equivalent of a stellar growth spurt. During these periods, young stars rapidly acquire mass by gorging on surrounding star-forming gas, leading to a sudden increase in luminosity. The team tracked hundreds of millions of stars and identified 32 erupting protostars that increased in brightness at least 40-fold and in some cases more than 300-fold.
Another group of red giant stars near the centre of the Milky Way unexpectedly showed up in the analysis, however. When they were studied in more detail using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope, seven of the stars were deemed to be a new type of red giant star, which the researchers named "old smokers." Convection currents and instabilities within the star could trigger the release of enormous columns of smoke, Prof Philip Lucas of the University of Hertfordshire, who led the observations, suggested.
Another group of red giant stars near the centre of the Milky Way unexpectedly showed up in the analysis, however. When they were studied in more detail using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope, seven of the stars were deemed to be a new type of red giant star, which the researchers named "old smokers." Convection currents and instabilities within the star could trigger the release of enormous columns of smoke, Prof Philip Lucas of the University of Hertfordshire, who led the observations, suggested.
82 (Score:3)
Astronomers have discovered a mysterious group of giant elderly stars at the heart of the Milky Way that are emitting solar system-sized clouds of dust and gas.
"The cloud measures...my god! 82 AUs in diameter!"
Restore the grandeur of Vger!
When is the Sun stop being boring? (Score:2)
When is the Sun going to flicker and belch? Kind of odd how the thing is so damn stable, is statistical mechanics so fucking reliable? Fucking Boltzmann what an ass.
Re:When is the Sun stop being boring? (Score:5, Informative)
Because it's a middle aged star, and in general, so long as they've got lots of hydrogen fuel, stars like the Sun are pretty well behaved. When the hydrogen supply finally begins to run out, in a few billion years, if there's anyone around, life will get a lot more uncomfortable.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
red dwarfs flare violently, bigger stars become unstable after nearly exhausting their nuclear fuel. Our sun has billions of years to get that way but cheer up just the slow expansion of it will render Earth unfit for multicellular life in mere hundreds of millions of years.
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More likely we, or our AI descendents, will be space-dwelling by then anyway,.
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More likely we, or our AI descendents, will be space-dwelling by then anyway,.
More likely we, thanks to corporate Kick-the-can-down-the-road politics will be stuck here dying while the 1% are off on their free-world adventures
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AI isn't aware nor alive, you could set up a bunch of pneumatic valves or relays to do what AI does. A trillion or quintillion or quadrillion valves will be just as unfeeling. What a fallacy to imagine a biological neuron can be emulated by a digital circuit when we don't even know how memory, just one piece of the puzzle, works.
Re: When is the Sun stop being boring? (Score:2)
How astronomers could which stars were old (Score:2)
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They were the stars that were shaking their fists at the younger stars complaining how they ruined the galaxy
Sounds like ancient stars residing in an astrophysical retirement home.
I can hear it now: Stay away from my Dark Matter you immature little ruffians !
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and git off my dust lane!
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H. A. Rey was right! (Score:1)
Not clear how old these stars are (Score:2)
"Giant red star" implies it's the end-of-life of a relatively large star, which don't typically live that long, so how can they be "ancient"? I would consider "ancient" to be about 10 or more billion years old. They should be long gone into small white neutron stars or black holes. It did say "new kind of star", so maybe they don't know yet.
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What if the universe is not only stranger than you imagine, but stranger than you can imagine?
Re: universe...stranger than you can imagine (Score:1)
I'm tempted to make a joke about that tribble-haired tinted person.
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I've said it before, and I'll say it again - don't waste time reading the press release (or journalistic regurgitation of it). Go direct to the Friendly Paper.
Which I'll now try to find.
If in Doubt, Read The Friendly Paper ... (Score:4, Interesting)
It's a descriptive paper of 222 variable sources detected by a 9.5 year survey of the Galactic Bulge (that's the bright blob of the Milky Way, in and around the constellation of Sagittarius ; it's the central region of the galaxy). Many of the variable sources they detect fit into established categories (well, it's hardly the first survey of any part of the sky, so people should have come up with classifications already!), but ...
Which seem to be the novelty. However, possibly confusingly to journalists without a science background, they also make comments about commonalities observed in the class of "Young Stellar Objects" (YSOs) and how they accrete and expel matter - though maybe at different times. The two different classes seem to be confusing to the PR-writers. RTFP!
The variability that they found in their target - YSOs - included multiple dimmings, inferred to be due to patchy distribution of circumstellar matter. (Supplementary information figure E1 : "Light curves of the eight dipping YSOs. The variation in these systems is thought to be due to variable extinction by circumstellar matter." That may not mean much to you, but to me it sounds like the irregular and sometimes deep dimmings seen in "Tabby's Star [slashdot.org]". See - Dyson sphere fan's - it hasn't been forgotten. Just reeled into a wider class of prosaic phenomena as an extreme example.
But where do they mention "old smokers"? Nowhere - in the paper. Working their way through the variable objects they detected, they report
The "eight transients denoted âsparseâ(TM)," would seem to be the Press Release's "seven of the stars [...] deemed to be a new type of red giant star, which the researchers named 'old smokers'." The reader should note that one observation of a spectrum is normally sufficient to identify a star in the "red giant" phase of it's life ; but by the astronomer's own classification, these stars have too little data to be understood. (There is a silent "[comma] so far" in there ; there always is.)
The wider significance of this possible discovery of a new class of stars is easily overstated though. The Press Release notes quote the team leader as saying that
Which is certainly not untrue. But it doesn't mention that essentially all large stars are thought to lose significant amounts of mass in the later stages of their life, and the bigger the star, the more mass they lose. There are whole classes of star identified by their massive outflows of newly synthesised elements in the last millennia of their lives, such as
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So what they're saying is... (Score:2)
...older stars have found themselves addicted, unable kick the habit, and unable to stop smoking.
This is a terrible burden on intergalactic healthcare and a bad influence on a younger generation.