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31 Comments
- hawkspur, on 12/15/2009, -0/+13550 years closer
- mwtapp, on 12/15/2009, -0/+10FTA: About 550 LIGHT-YEARS from Earth, a star like our Sun is writhing in its death throes.
If we can watch the star dying from Earth; doesn't that mean that the star is even closer to death right now? - pwarnock, on 12/15/2009, -2/+12Fascinating. Is Mankind smart enough to survive that long?
- MacBookForMe, on 12/15/2009, -0/+7What an amazing video about that red giant!
- doctorgrim, on 12/15/2009, -0/+6Damn nature, you scary!
- TimidTurtleTodd, on 12/15/2009, -0/+3every planet out to Mars!? NO! That would mean... MARS WOULD BE GONE!
- linksus, on 12/15/2009, -0/+3Boom.
- RealmDown, on 12/15/2009, -0/+3Unless it stopped for lunch.
- themastersb, on 12/15/2009, -0/+3wat. I see you've lost Train of Thought 1-5.
- ghengiskhan1, on 12/15/2009, -4/+6Suddenly, global warming seems very irrelevant (again).
- pln2bz, on 12/22/2009, -0/+2Page 150 of "Disciplined Minds" seems to describe Nereid as the "gung ho" student defending her faculty's values ...
"For an example of how similar the screening process can be in a more academic profession, let's move from the police academy to the chemistry department of a 40,000-student 'Big Ten' university. The liberal professors who run the PhD program here would be insulted to see their setup likened to that of a police academy. Yet the two training programs share an essential feature: an environment that some students find to be perfectly friendly but that, at the same time, is very hostile to students whose attitudes and values don't conform to the dominant ones. And here in academe, just like at the police academy, 'good' students not only adopt the faculty's values as their own, but also go after students who fail to do so. Such attacks should come as no surprise, because non-conformity, no matter how quiet, stands out as a challenge to the dominant values, which form the core of professional training. Although students are often the ones who do the dirty work of answering challenges to the faculty's values, the faculty is ultimately responsible for the attacks, because the gung-ho students who launch them are simply carrying the faculty's values to their logical conclusion." - inactive, on 12/15/2009, -1/+3Cue the "people are bad" comments from Diggers. Why don't you go sing a song about how in the year 2525 I won't need my eyes?
- kingbinji, on 12/15/2009, -2/+4good thing i'll be dead before that happens. i wouldn't want to be around for that.
- yacks, on 12/15/2009, -1/+3Good to know, we'd be dead before it hits supernova if our sun did that.
- APODNereid, on 12/19/2009, -0/+2A person who understands plasma physics soon recognises just how awful this description is, pln2bz.
For starters, words are nice, but just how many amps per square metre must there be for a star to be red? blue? Seriously, if you can't give even an approximate estimate of this value, why promote this idea? After all, it's not as if your heroes hadn't been working on this for many decades already ...
Then there's how you explain the observed masses, diameters, variability, etc across the HR diagram ...
... and how this idea would work for the thousands of known binaries (whose separations vary from zero - contact binaries - to many thousands of au).
What I'm most puzzled about is why you continue to repeat stuff you know perfectly well is untrue (e.g. "what about the stragglers - the red giants"), and why you have apparently made no effort whatsoever to actually learn the basics of stellar evolution ... - dromni, on 12/15/2009, -0/+2Is Mankind smart enough to leave this ball of rock as soon as possible, before we are fried by the sun or hit by asteroids or whatever?
- TheSwashbuckler, on 12/15/2009, -0/+1I came up with about two minutes.
- Bdog2g2, on 12/15/2009, -1/+2perhaps for you....I'm currently not orbiting said star so GW is still fairly relevant to my interests
- TheSwashbuckler, on 12/15/2009, -0/+1A black hole may come along and swallow everything up long before that happens.
- Bdog2g2, on 12/15/2009, -1/+2550 years closer to death for a star like saying you're 4.3 minutes closer to death.
- TheSwashbuckler, on 12/15/2009, -0/+1It's like sitting with someone for a couple of minutes and saying they're closer to death. Yeah, it's true, but it's truly neglible.
- Bdog2g2, on 12/16/2009, -0/+1@TheSwashbuckler
Actually you're correct. I took an age of 5 billion years (current age of the sun) instead of 10 billion (expected lifespan of the sun). Then I assumed 75 years for the average lifespan of a human.
Either way 4 minutes or 2 minutes....in the grand scheme doesn't amount to much. - pln2bz, on 12/20/2009, -1/+2Re: "Your bullet points illustrate closed loop assumption, circular reasoning and pseudo-confirmation."
These failures of logic are demanded by the system which Nereid seeks to become a part of. Her willingness to avoid the critical thinking process on topics which threaten the ideological framework within which she works confirms the theory espoused in Jeff Schmidt's "Disciplined Minds" (p 148) ...
[quote]Being a good civics student and learning to recite the right ideology won't get you a job where ideology is important, a professional job. An institution is not going to trust someone to make decisions in its interest and in its name unless that person shows an almost instinctive feeling for the right ideology. To become a person whose instincts employers can trust, the aspiring professional must not only be willing and able to accept from the system the ideological direction of his professional work, he must also *internalize* the assigned ideology, or at least act convincingly as if he has done so ... Internalizing an ideology means more than becoming very good at following its dictates. It means adopting it as one's own. Only that earns the trust of employers. The result is a reliable servant who sees himself as self-directed, for in his work his employers let him make most decisions according to what he feels is right.[/quote]
It's almost unfair to expect NASA employees to question their ideological framework (ie, the cosmology). After all, the chances are that it would get her fired from her job, and destroy her career with the APOD. But, what Nereid needs to realize is that somebody still needs to contemplate these big questions. And far from being some sort of threat, she should be thankful that people are having these sorts of conversations, free from the pressures which she must conform to. - nowhereelse, on 12/20/2009, -1/+2Your bullet points illustrate closed loop assumption, circular reasoning and pseudo-confirmation. Do you even realise how many assumptions have been made to claim that you can measure a star's mass just by looking at it through a telescope? Or density? We don't even have a robust theory to account for the behaviour of our nearest star. Nor is helioseismology the science you claim it is because it consititutes only obeservation and can not experiment.
When you're not too busy trying to shout down conflicting theories in astronomy you should try anaylsing the chain of assumptions in each of your claims. Bear in mind that competing theories claim that you are unable to accurately measure distance by red shift and that you are wrong in assuming the dominant role of gravity. Try being critical and being honest with yourself about what is data and what is assumption or theory.
I'd be interested to see your comments on the falsifiying examples I cited and the ability of theory to predict and account for supernovae too. - pln2bz, on 12/20/2009, -1/+2Re: "Of course there are open questions - astronomy wouldn't be a science if all questions were considered answered - but answering questions in science means making the theory better ..."
Nereid, you sound like a programmed robot. At what point do you question the cosmology which you're assuming? Once you "disqualify" a cosmology, do you ever go back and attempt to interpret observations through that cosmology to validate that you didn't make a mistake? Humans do sometimes make mistakes. - pln2bz, on 12/20/2009, -1/+1Re: "For starters, words are nice, but just how many amps per square metre must there be for a star to be red? blue? Seriously, if you can't give even an approximate estimate of this value, why promote this idea? After all, it's not as if your heroes hadn't been working on this for many decades already ..."
I love it: Somebody at NASA is asking me to create mathematical models for them. Are you guys going to pay me?
Re: "Then there's how you explain the observed masses, diameters, variability, etc across the HR diagram ..."
The funny thing is that if your superiors decided that that is what you were doing this week, you would either do it or lose your job. Get it?
Re: "... and how this idea would work for the thousands of known binaries (whose separations vary from zero - contact binaries - to many thousands of au)."
Within the EU, binaries form because of electrical stress. Stellar fissioning increases the surface area, which reduces the electrical stress. But, why are you trying to disprove the model before trying to understand it?
Re: "What I'm most puzzled about is why you continue to repeat stuff you know perfectly well is untrue (e.g. "what about the stragglers - the red giants"), and why you have apparently made no effort whatsoever to actually learn the basics of stellar evolution ..."
When comparing cosmologies, it's important to not just settle on the first you hear about. That's a philosophically weak approach. It's important that as a debunker you demonstrate to people that you care enough to read about both theories sufficient to draw a meaningful conclusion. You need to pass off at least an aura that you are trying to suspend belief long enough to read about that which you disagree. - pln2bz, on 12/16/2009, -2/+2Dead on (and a far more understandable critique than my own above).
And this is where the plasma-based cosmologies truly shine. In the article at http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=x49g6g ... there is a diagram:
http://www.holoscience.com/news/img/H-R%20diagram. ...
Now, watch how easy it is to get laboratory plasma physics to explain the HR diagram:
[quote]
Astronomers use the Herzsprung-Russell (H-R) diagram to categorize stars. It is a plot of the absolute brightness of stars against their spectral class (temperature).
The data graphed by the H-R diagram are observed quantities, while assumptions drawn about the diagram’s meaning are not. Clearly, not being electrical engineers, astronomers have got things precisely backwards (left). As you increase the current density to an electric arc, the light becomes brighter, hotter, and therefore bluer. In other words, the current density is responsible for both the luminosity (y-axis) and the color temperature (x axis) of the H-R diagram. That explains the near 45˚slope of the so-called ‘main sequence’ stars in the corrected H-R diagram (right).
At the lower left-hand end of the main sequence we find the red dwarfs – small stars under low electrical stress, in which anode tufting is sparse and the light from the tufts is emitted at low energies, toward the red end of the spectrum. A good deal of the red light comes from the chromospheric anode glow.
As we move diagonally upward and to the right on the H-R diagram the stars become more massive and the current density increases. Anode tufting becomes more intense and the tufts’ mutual repulsion forces the photosphere to grow to accommodate them. At the top right of the main sequence the light from the tufts is the electric blue of a true arc and the stars appear as ‘blue giants’ — intensely hot objects considerably larger than our Sun. These blue giants tend to be concentrated on the central axes of our galaxy’s spiral arm arms, where the galactic currents are strongest.
But what about the stragglers — the red giants and the white dwarfs? Here the natural simplicity of the electric star model shines. Stellar color and luminosity are discontinuous functions for good reason: plasma discharge phenomena at an anode exhibit sharp discontinuities. Thermonuclear star models projecting theoretical stellar evolution onto the H-R diagram require great imagination to explain these discontinuities. Usually it requires that a star explodes, or else the transition off the main sequence is said to be so rapid that we don’t see a continuous plot. The terms ‘giant’ and ‘dwarf,’ when applied to these stars, are highly misleading since a star’s size is a plasma phenomenon too. And the notions that a red giant is an old, dying star, and that a white dwarf is a remnant of an exploded star, have no validity.
[/quote]
Yes, a person has to understand some plasma physics concepts in order to explain it. But, the fact that the HR diagram can be explained with fundamental plasma physics concepts is incredibly important to realize. - APODNereid, on 12/19/2009, -2/+2Wrong on every count, nowhereelse.
Let me count a few:
A star's position on the HR diagram (luminosity vs colour, remember?), plus theory, tells you:
* what mass it should have ... observe just such a star in a binary, and what mass does it turn out to have? (no gold stars for getting the answer right)
* what its diameter should be ... observe just such a star in an eclipsing binary (or with an interferometer, etc), and what diameter does it turn out to have?
* what sort of variability it should have ... observe just such a star carefully enough, and what sort of variability does it have?
* what sort of structure it should have (density and temperature vs depth) ... apply the techniques of helioseismology to just such a star, and what sort of structure does it have?
Of course there are open questions - astronomy wouldn't be a science if all questions were considered answered - but answering questions in science means making the theory better ... - nowhereelse, on 12/16/2009, -3/+2The claims that astronomers make about stellar life cycles have no basis in observation. The H-R diagram was compiled as a summary of observations. Later it was assumed on statistical grounds that the H-R diagram is a depiction of the stellar life cycle.
But the diagram cannot support stellar evolution theory since it is a static snapshot. The theory is an attempt to explain the observations but, due to the timescales proposed for stellar lifetimes, no confirmatory examples have ever been observed.
Furthermore, the only examples of changes in stellar objects which have been made all run counter to the theory and have been labeled exceptions. FG Sagittae, V605 Aquilae, V4334 Sagittarii and V838 Monocerotis have all exhibited behaviour and changes which falsify stellar evolution theory.
Let's just summarise that. Stellar evolution theory has not been confirmed by a single observed stellar change and all changes that have been observed have required changes to the theory because they don't fit. Just how many times does a theory have to fail before astronomers will ditch it? - pln2bz, on 12/15/2009, -6/+3Wal Thornhill provides some useful context for trying to understand these periodic variations in luminosity and size in red dwarfs. Although he specifically discusses the star Betelgeuse, the same analysis holds true for our observations of Chi Cygni. Keep in mind that, far from being speculation, all that Wal is doing here is applying fundamental plasma physics principles we observe within the laboratory to our observations of red stars. A strict interpretation of the behavior of the plasma glow discharge (like the HPS and metal-halide street lamps we light our streets with), as gleaned from an engineering textbook like Cobine's "Gaseous Conductors", provides the plasma physicist with all that he needs to know to explain the observed behavior of stars.
It's not necessary that theorists and astronomers should expect "surprises" from more detailed observations of cosmic objects, as the article suggests. We can already explain these observations using laboratory science if we're willing to just read what plasma-based cosmology has to say about them.
From http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=jdjcab ... ...
[quote]
The notion that a star (the Sun) might be powered externally was condemned without proper investigation by the pioneer of the thermonuclear model of stars, Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington. As witness, his opening words in The Internal Constitution of the Stars (1930), “At first sight it would seem that the deep interior of the sun and stars is less accessible to scientific investigation than any other region of the universe.” But immediately Eddington assumed a principle that cannot fail to keep man in perpetual ignorance of the real nature of stars: “radiant energy from the hot interior after many deflections and transformations manages to struggle to the surface and begin its journey across space.” This assumption, if correct, would make stars the only known bodies in the universe that transfer internal heat by radiation. Normally, conduction and convection do the job. So it is not a trivial assumption backed up by observation or experiment. The idea that stars are fuelled from the inside did not come from some scientific discovery. It is an idea as old as the discovery of fire. It was introduced as a belief, as an ideological perversion of science.
Eddington had a paternalistic put-down for any of his contemporaries so rash as to suggest that a star might be powered from the outside, and he succeeded very well in squelching any further theorizing in that direction. But his reasoning was flawed by assumptions he failed to recognize as such—for example: “Given, that energy flows out from the interior of a star.” —Ralph E. Juergens.
It is easy to see, with hindsight, that Eddington’s influence combined with his peculiar views provided a ‘mental map’ to divert and to retard progress in understanding stars for a century. The forming, by gravitational collapse, of a star with a superhot core composed of the lightest gas, hydrogen, is a remarkable ‘Heath-Robinson’ construction based on the choice of an improbable model with consequent unlikely assumptions. It fails the observational test because nothing we observe on the Sun and above the Sun is predictable from the nuclear fusion model. And surprising new discoveries have required ad hoc additions to the model, while many basic observations remain unexplained—like the superhot corona above a “cold” photosphere.
“A star like the Sun is remarkable… We have the strange phenomenon of a relatively cool body in space enveloped in an immensely hot atmosphere. (We can note in passing that the Earth’s upper atmosphere is hotter than its surface but this is less remarkable as in the Earth’s case the energy comes from without.)” Prof. R L F Boyd, F.R.S., Space Physics – the study of plasmas in space, Oxford Physics Series. [Emphasis added]
“Science frequently makes choices between alternatives. Once the choice is made, however, scientists tend to unify behind the accepted alternative to the extent of denying and eventually forgetting that there was any ‘real’ choice made. Subsequent textbooks gloss over any possible alternatives, depicting science as a straightforward march up the one correct path toward truth. Since it is forgotten and denied that such choices existed, the results of these choices are rarely reviewed. Not only is there no provision, or incentive, for such a review, there is positive, and powerful, peer pressure against any such questioning of basic premises. —Don L. Hotson.
[...]
I wrote about red giant stars in Twinkle, twinkle electric star, “Red stars are those stars that cannot satisfy their hunger for electrons from the surrounding plasma. So the star expands the surface area over which it collects electrons by growing a large plasma sheath that becomes the effective collecting area of the stellar anode in space. The growth process is self-limiting because, as the sheath expands, its electric field will grow stronger. Electrons caught up in the field are accelerated to ever-greater energies. Before long, they become energetic enough to excite neutral particles they chance to collide with, and the huge sheath takes on a uniform ‘red anode glow.’ It becomes a red giant star.
The electric field driving this process will also give rise to a massive flow of positive ions away from the star, or in more familiar words—a prodigious stellar ‘wind.’ Indeed, such mass loss is a characteristic feature of red giants. Standard stellar theory is at a loss to explain this since the star is said to be too ‘cold’ to ‘boil off’ a stellar wind. And radiation pressure is totally inadequate. So when seen in electric terms, instead of being near the end point of its life, a red giant may be a ‘child’ losing sufficient mass and charge to begin the next phase of its existence— on the main sequence.”
[...]
The UV image of Betelgeuse is smooth apart from the occasional hotspot. This is quite distinct from the UV image of the Sun, which typically has a mottled appearance due to many active regions. This smoothness of the light from Betelgeuse is a result of the quite different mode of plasma discharge of dim red stars from that of bright main sequence stars. It is the difference between the diffuse voluminous glow of a neon tube and the pinpoint light from an arc lamp.
The electric model of bright stars shows that there is an exquisitely simple control mechanism introduced by a bright photosphere. The photosphere acts like a junction transistor to regulate the current flow between the star and its environment. It results in a remarkably steady output of light and heat radiation despite a varying power supply. For example, the Sun, viewed in X-rays, is a variable star. X-rays are generated high above the photosphere and are a measure of electrical power input. They reveal the variability of the Sun’s power source. The photosphere generates the radiant output, which is stabilized by its transistor effect.
Dim red stars like Betelgeuse do not have the same power control mechanism. They respond to variation in their power supply instead by varying the surface area of their glowing plasma sheath—in other words, their visible size. Our own Sun varies slightly in size, much to the puzzlement of astrophysicists. However, what is called “the photosphere” of Betelgeuse is physically and electrically nothing like the photosphere of bright stars.
[...]
The report states that Betelguese’s visible brightness, or magnitude, has shown no significant dimming over the past 15 years despite the star’s shrinkage. This seems odd if the bloated atmosphere were due to heating from the star. However, the electrical model may offer a simple solution. As the red supergiant’s atmosphere shrinks, the anode glow remains. It is rather similar to merely shortening a neon tube. The luminous efficiency increases with the increasing particle density nearer the star, which could offset the loss of emitting surface.
[end quote] - TrainOfThought6, on 12/15/2009, -6/+2...assuming Sol is the same age as Chi Cygni
