Mysterious Runaway Star Stymies Scientists

[Celebration]

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20051114/star_spa.html

Astronomers have stumbled onto a runaway star inbound to our galaxy that might have been kicked out of our nearest galactic neighbor by a supermassive black hole.

snip........................

The light from the star was both the wrong color (wavelength) for where the star is located and showed spectral signs that it is traveling inbound to the Milky Way at an unusually high speed — about 1.6 million miles per hour (2.6 million kilometers per hour).

..........snio


The bottom line: HE 0437-5439 is too far away from the center of the Milky Way to have made the trip and still be so young, said Napiwotzki, who, with several German colleagues, has authored a paper on the matter in a coming issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters.

[Fovea]

1. Here come the Pierson's puppeteers.

Look for a Kempler's rosette of planets.

Larry Niven predicted this...

[northernsoul]

6. can you elaborate on that for us dilletantes?

I'm a guy with little to no hard-science aptitude who was slowly but surely become a lot more interested in science, especially astronomy / astro-physics. I've been clumsily tip-toeing my way through Cosmos off and on for a few months now.
What you just said sounds fasciating, but I have no idea what it means. Can you provide a little more detail for us slow kids in the back of the room?

[darkmaestro019]

8. creepy, I'm re-reading that now. small world/great minds

Love me some Sagan; that book gives you a huge swatch of world history along with your astronomy....

I'm no expert, but you might like Hyperspace/Kaku and The Elegant Universe/Greene (I think) after that...lots of quantum physics but the same style of spoken-in-English, easy to read and stay interested.

And everything of Sagan's I've ever picked up has been devoured quickly and with great joy. : ) Pale Blue Dot moves me to tears in some places, but I'm awfully passionate about the Earth and how lucky we are to have it.

[Ian David]

7. I was having the same thought! LOL!

Klemperer Rosettes
Klemperer Rosettes are many moons forming a circle around a planet, with all moons having the same period. Also often called Kemplerer Rosettes by Larry Niven...
http://www.burtleburtle.net/bob/physics/kempler.html


Kemplerer Rosette
Planets without a sun; they orbit a central point.

The Pierson's Puppeteers are sentient herd animals. They find that, as their numbers approach one trillion individuals, that their societ produces too much heat. What to do, what to do?
"I had explained," said Nessus, "that our civilisation was dying in its own waste heat. Total conversion of energy had rid us of all waste products of civilisation, save that one. We had no choice but to move our world outward from its primary."

"Was that not dangerous?"

"Very. There was much madness that year. For that reason it is famous in our history. But we had purchased a reactionless, inertialess drive from the Outsiders. You may have guessed their price. We are still paying in installments. We had moved two agricultural worlds; we had experimented with other, useless worlds of our system using the Outsider drive. In any case, we did it. We moved our world."

"In short, we found that a sun was a liability rather than an asset. We moved our world to a tenth of a light year's distance, keeping the primary only as an anchor. We needed the farming worlds and it would have been dangerous to let our world wander randomly through space. Otherwise we would not have needed a sun at all."

"We had brought suitable worlds from nearby systems, increasing our agricultural worlds to four, and setting them in a Kemplerer Rosette."

A Kemplerer Rosette was first described by W.B. Klemperer in 1962, in an article in The Astronomical Journal. See some very cool java applets that let you envision Kemplerer rosettes more easily.

Read/Leave comments: ( 1 )

Additional resources:
More Ideas and Technology from Ringworld
More Ideas and Technology by Larry Niven
Tech news articles related to Ringworld
Tech news articles related to works by Larry Niven

Kemplerer Rosette-related SF in the News articles:
- Planets May Wander Alone


More:
http://technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=605

[Dogmudgeon]

11. What is Fiction and what is Fact?

A lot of "hard sci-fi" is wonderous to read, but among sci-fi fans online, it's difficult to tell the difference between the fact and the fiction. A lot of these ideas are spoken of as if they are Holy Writ, even satiric, "magickal", or blue-sky stuff, and nanotech is the current explanation for nearly all the "tech" in the world of science fiction, although all of the nanotech we have so far is "static" (that is, not robotic, does not reproduce, and has no artificial intelligence).

The problem is that most SF-talk assumes that all "mundane" people are really SMOFs -- Secret Masters Of (Sci-Fi) Fandom. Interpreters are few and far between.

Fen -- are you listening?

--p!

Notes:

1. Please pardon my use of quotation marks "like this". It seemed to be the easiest way to handle jargon.


2. "Fen" is plural of "Fan", as in "Science Fiction Fans".

[HereSince1628]

2. Look, the Milky Way is NOT taking immigrants without papers!

You know a young rebellious star like this is just gonna come in and cause trouble.

[UrbScotty]

3. I thought they were talking about Lindsay Lohan.

:evilgrin:

[htuttle]

4. Is that going about 0.2% the speed of light?

That's fast.

I wonder if it's going fast enough for relativistic time effects to be a factor? That might account for it being younger than it should be. (though I just did some googling on it, and at 0.2% the speed of light, it would only add/subtract about 20 years every thousand, if I figured it right).:shrug:

[shoelace414]

5. Science doesn't know?

the I guess we should teach intelligent design

[Ian David]

9. Dyson Sphere?? n/t

[Ian David]

10. Star too young: What if it didn't collect enough matter to ignite until...

somewhere in the middle of the trip?

For example, could it have been scooping-up gas and dust along the way and only "recently" reached ignition?

Here's an even more exotic idea...

If it was ejected from outside the event horizon of a black hole, could it have been subject to faster-than-light speed by "framedragging"?

[Dogmudgeon]

12. It's a big universe

I'm sure that there are more exceptions than there are rules.

When you come right down to it, we know so little about the universe that we shouldn't get cocky about how much we DO know. This, in iteself, is a great source of beneficial awe, and should energize hundreds of years of scientific exploration -- and probably much more. In a thousand years, the concept of "frames" alone could lead to one PhD for every person who is alive today.

--p!

[bananas]

13. note the Mach beads

http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/propulsion/q0224.shtml