NASA discovers a "star unlike any seen before."

badastronomy.com — when you look at this image of Mira with its comet-like tail, think on this: you are seeing a star’s way of making new stars. Like life itself, in death is renewal and the foundation for future generations. Aug 15, 2007 View in Crawl 4

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hetman Aug 16, 2007

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I agree with you. I love the city, I love the people around me. Cities seem to show me how different diverse crowds can get along. However the country is amazing. Seeing the stars are amazing. Seeing the milky way is amazing. It is really aostuning to me how we can see the edge of are galacy. All I can type cannot compare to what you really see.

matrixbandit Aug 16, 2007

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Thanks for linking to that higher res version. I can't help but noticing that when viewed at full res, it looks like someone applied a pretty heavy median filter to it, probably to compensate for noise.. I kinda wish they hadn't because the edges of everything are all smoothed out and blended as a result.

hello1024 Aug 16, 2007

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dugg down for inaccuracy:" Sun will be a white dwarf, and will slowly cool for the next few hundred billion years."Nope - if the universe is only 11-15 billion years old, there's no way it can take "a few hundred billion" years to cool down.

chenbot Aug 16, 2007

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What he means is that since stars are already going, it can't possibly take hundreds of billions of years for the sun for die out too. Mira can be at most about 15 billion years old, so it can be inferred that the Sun will reach that status within the next 15 billion years, not hundreds of billions of years.