Comments on: Galaxy forms raptured stars: Left Behind

By: In Which We Go Back To Middle School « This Recording

In Which We Go Back To Middle School « This Recording — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 14:01:10 +0000

[...] He is working in Circuit City and is an electronic wizard. He has met so many movie, music, and other forms or stars. He used to work in a Virgin Megastore on Sunset Blvd. He has a roommate named Wayne. I have a [...]

By: occam's comic

occam's comic — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 03:14:09 +0000

blizno,
Sometimes its useful to think energy, instead of temperature. And again its not an atom that is floating there but protons (positively charged) and electrons (negatively charged) that are moving. And moving electric charges make a current, electrical currents create magnetic fields which shapes the movement of electrons and protons. This feedback loop can create long filamentary (stringy) structures.
So you see there are more ways for plasma (as opposed to gas) to ’store’ energy: the movement of the ions, the magnetic fields that are created, the reduction in entropy by forming structure.

By: blizno

blizno — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 20:29:05 +0000

I still don’t understand why a diffuse plasma where each atom is essentially floating alone can keep such incredible temperatures. Surely a particle at millions of degrees would shed photons into interstellar space very quickly. Why doesn’t a solitary nucleus radiate enough energy to cool itself from millions of K to thousands or hundreds of K within a year or so (or a fraction of a second)? Is it because local space is full of photons shed by other millions-of-degree particles and a local particle that sheds a high-energy photon is likely to be hit by somebody else’s high-energy photon, re-energizing it?

By: blizno

blizno — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 20:05:07 +0000

“#
# Quiet_Desperationon 20 Sep 2007 at 1:55 pm

Waitâ€¦ I live in a largish city. What are these â€œstarsâ€ of which you speak?”

“Stars” look a lot like passenger jets except they don’t blink and they don’t move (unless you take pictures months or years apart).
Try to imagine a streetlight, but it’s very small, very sharp and waaay up in the sky. Then imagine a trillion of them…

I joke because I have lived in a huge city (Chicago, Illinois) where you were lucky to see six stars during the clearest of nights. I have also spent lots of time camping in one of the last great wildernesses of the USA, the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, BWCA, (a huge, wild, pristine national park spanning a gigantic area of northern Minnesota, pressed against the border with Canada.
Too much information:
http://www.fs.fed.us/r9/forests/superior/bwcaw/bwhist.php

I’ve sat bolt-upright with my heart pounding in my ears while moose the size of houses thundered within feet of my tiny tent during the wee, dark hours. I’ve slumped on a boulder slack-jawed while the Aurora Borealis squirmed across the sky over my head. I’ve seen the Milky Way splashed so bright across the sky that my heart ached to witness such grandeur.

That such a gigantic piece of one of the best US states to live in (Minnesota) is still kept carefully pristine encourages me for the future of humanity. Maybe there can remain a few pockets of Earth unspoilt. I so, so wish it.

By: RoaldFalcon

RoaldFalcon — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 20:58:01 +0000

Didnâ€™t someone recently release a picture of the first known star with a tail. Now someone else comes along and says â€œThatâ€™s nothinâ€™. Look at this.â€

By: Jonathan Lubin

Jonathan Lubin — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 19:48:30 +0000

There’s a great novel by Ian Banks, Against a Dark Background, where the action takes place in an isolated system between galaxies, in which the whole culture, even after having achieved space flight, is chronically depressed, ’cause they know they’ll never be able to visit any other star system, no matter how clever they get.

By: Nigel Depledge

Nigel Depledge — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 11:13:17 +0000

Another nice piece, BA.

I, too, would appreciate hearing your take on the gas / plasma controversy.

Plus: OOOhhh! Pretty!!!