Welcome Coast to Coasters! If this is your first time here, have a look around. You’ll probably find both stuff you like and stuff you disagree with. I encourage you to comment on either or both. I’m all about the rational discourse here.
Sometimes, I just like linking to pretty pictures:
But of course I have to describe it.
This is the nebula Gum 29, a vast cloud of gas surrounding the cluster Westerlund 2. If that cluster sounds familiar, then you are a major BA geek: I’ve written about it in the past here and here. It’s a beefy cluster: if you added up all the stars, they would mass 100,000 times that of the Sun! There is also a star deep in the heart of the nebula that is actually a binary, two stars orbiting each other (you can see them better in this image). Called WR20a, each of the two stars has more than 80 times the mass of the Sun! That’s near the upper limit of what a star can be, so having two orbiting each other is incredible. A binary like this may be unique in the entire Milky Way galaxy!
Both stars will blow up soon. That’ll be a pair of pretty big bangs when they do. Happily, at 26,000 light years distant, they’re too far away to hurt us (they’d have to be within about 100 light years or so to do anything to us; I have all the gory details in my book — take a look to your right in the blog sidebar), but close enough that they’ll make an incredible show. But it may take a few thousand more years before they pop.
The image was taken using the European Southern Observatory’s 2.2 meter ’scope in La Silla, Chile. It’s more or less "true color", though it also used a filter which picks out warm, glowing hydrogen gas to emphasize the nebula.
I’m sure there’s lot of science that can be squeezed from this image: how stars are born, how they die, how their cocooning gas behaves during all this, how clusters affect the way stars are born.
That’s all very cool. But sometimes, just sometimes, I like to just look at the pretty pictures.
Image credit: ESO
October 21st, 2008 at 4:21 pm
I can’t find an initial link or see an image here. The subsequent links in the text seem to be working fine, though.
October 21st, 2008 at 4:22 pm
So will the binary stars blow up together, or one at a time? I guess that’s asking if one supernova can trigger another if it’s near enough?
October 21st, 2008 at 4:35 pm
Ditto to ABR’s comment. Wah! I want to see a purty picture!
October 21st, 2008 at 4:43 pm
They’ll blow up soon? Need more info.
October 21st, 2008 at 4:46 pm
I agree Phil. Sometimes its really easy to get caught up in complex mathematics, and overlook the true beauty of nature.
October 21st, 2008 at 4:50 pm
OMFSM! I think I see an image of a piece of toast in there!
October 21st, 2008 at 5:04 pm
Here’s something that always confuses me when talking about astronomy: You say “Both stars will blow up soon.” But since they are 26,000 light years away, any observations we are making currently are of events that took place 26,000 years ago, correct? So really, the chances are good that they have already blown up, and we just don’t know about it yet. Right?
October 21st, 2008 at 5:04 pm
I get the image in FireFox but not in IE. Interesting….
October 21st, 2008 at 5:08 pm
This is a little off topic, but did anyone else see World’s Toughest Fixes on NatGeo where they cleaned and resurfaced one of the mirrors at the VLT? If not it’s worth checking out.
October 21st, 2008 at 5:10 pm
Same results here, Trebuchet. I was using IE and couldn’t see the image. With Firefox, I can see it just fine. And a very “purty” picture it is!
October 21st, 2008 at 5:58 pm
Hmmm, Phil, any chance of a link for those of us who dumped Firefox after we got tired of dealing with the js3250.dll issue? I’d love to se this, and I’m feeling left out!
October 21st, 2008 at 6:02 pm
Thank goodness IE lets me look at a site’s coding. Here’s the link:
http://www.eso.org/public/outreach/press-rel/pr-2008/phot-37-08.html
October 21st, 2008 at 6:04 pm
Ugh, I was able to use View => Source to get the code for the link, but posting the link got the comment stuck in the moderation queue. Anyone else using IE can do the same, I suppose.
October 21st, 2008 at 9:03 pm
Hey Andrew, what about getting caught up in the true beauty of complex mathematics?
Nature’s pretty cool, but in a fight between nature and maths I wouldn’t be placing any bets.
October 21st, 2008 at 9:11 pm
http://www.eso.org/public/outreach/press-rel/pr-2008/phot-37-08.html
Here’s the link to the site with the picture, for anyone who can’t find it in the article.
October 21st, 2008 at 9:33 pm
The like right below yours on coast to coast
With UFO footage looks like a Cylon Raider
The old one from the ‘70s, I guess it took em a while to get here.
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/ufos/article1836403.ece
It’s probably fake but just in case RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!!!
October 21st, 2008 at 9:48 pm
Ah, interesting. I found a missing end bracket in the code. Evidently, FF can figure that out, but IE can’t. Anyway, I fixed it, so people using (shudder) IE should be able to see it now.
October 21st, 2008 at 9:56 pm
Off topic:
Being a avid BABloggee and an Indian, I would like to see your take on the successful launch of India’s Moon mission (Chandrayaan).
Just to start off a discussion, what would you think a successful space policy for a developing country look like?
October 21st, 2008 at 10:02 pm
Generally since space belongs to everyone more the merrier and congrats to the indians for doing it.
October 22nd, 2008 at 1:22 am
Phil:
… each of the two stars has more than 80 times the mass of the Sun! That’s near the upper limit of what a star can be …
But what about stars like Eta Carinae? I thought Eta Carinae was supposed to be over 100 solar masses. Is that wrong?
October 22nd, 2008 at 2:35 am
JSug: I always thought it was customary to consider things that we “see” happening as “occurring right now”. By all practical measures, those stars are both still quite un-exploded (to us), right?
I’ll admit I’m confused as well – where do we draw the line? It takes a few mins for signals to reach us from Mars, so when a rover drives off a cliff, would we say it occurred right when we got its “oh crap” signal, or a few minutes prior? For planning and communications reasons we’d have to account for this lag – otherwise falling-off-cliff scenarios would be much more prevalent!
Phil? Anyone? What is usually the case?
October 22nd, 2008 at 5:32 am
@Trebuchet:
With a separation of about 0.25 AU, I would expect that the stars would cook off in quick succession. The first supernova would blow off a large portion of the outer layers of the second, thus dramatically changing the balance between the pressure at the center of the star from fusion) and the weight of the layers above it. Removing the outer layers would allow the core of the second star to expand QUICKLY.
October 22nd, 2008 at 6:45 am
Awesome.
“[Full Res - TIFF: 8228 x 8277 pix - 117.38M]”
Who in their right mind would want I massive picture like that? That’s slightly obscene.
I wish I still had access to a Sherpa(a 4 or 5 foot wide photo quality printer).
TheWalruss Says:
JSug: I always thought it was customary to consider things that we “see” happening as “occurring right now”. By all practical measures, those stars are both still quite un-exploded (to us), right?
No, they exploded a long time ago, and we are seeing it now. That’s what is happening. That’s how we should talk about it. If we start pretending that things only happen when we see them, it will only encourage ontological philosophers.
October 22nd, 2008 at 8:18 am
Redx: Ok, cool – I’m much more comfortable with that.
I was just thinking back to the wording in this post: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2008/10/01/blobs-excited-by-hot-flashes/
It says “the doomed star exploded in 1680″ even though it’s 10,000 light-years away. That was instrumental for explaining the reason the blobs only became visible 300 years after the initial explosion, but isn’t usually the way we refer to things?
Sorry for such newbie-ish questions, but I only recently got interested in astronomy so I’m a bit behind… and ontology and semantics are interesting to me because I’m a hobbyist-linguist and AI researcher, hehe. It’s so great to find a new place where people are excited about teaching others bite-size tidbits of various things!
October 22nd, 2008 at 8:31 am
I always enjoy listening to you when you are on coast. I am listening to it again over the streamlink while I write this. You hear it again, and after reading on your site, some stuff makes more sense…for those of us who are not up on what is going on out in space. I like to look at the images, and imagine what it looks like there. It is amazing to think that some of the stars we see at night, aren’t there anymore, that image hasn’t gotten to us yet. Wow! What would we look like to them, do you think? Just another blip in the sky? They would see the milky way, but I don’t think they could see our solar system. Right? Thanks for being such a great interview guest last night, into this morning.
October 22nd, 2008 at 12:06 pm
Jsug, Redex, theWalrus,
You might consider Einstein’s definition of simultaneity particularly for observers separated by large distances. I’m no expert but my understanding is that things indeed do happen when we see them. Yes we are looking back in time – sort of. The event happened a long time ago – if you were there. And if you were there you could travel at the speed of light (along with the light from the star) and tell us about it when you got here. However, we would age how ever many years it took, and you would not. For you it happened a second ago. For us a second ago. Only for us a lot of time has gone by and we’re a lot older.
There is no way to go back in time. For us these events happen when the light reaches us.
This website has an interesting animation and discusses the idea of simultaneity over large distances and even over the 385,693km between the earth and moon during the first lunar landing.
http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/RelativityOfSimultaneity/
Perhaps someone else can correct me or better explain it (?)
October 22nd, 2008 at 1:00 pm
Sure is pretty. Reminds me that the November National Geographic has an article on light pollution.
October 22nd, 2008 at 5:03 pm
There are some really freaking huge binaries in R136, too, though that’s in the LMC. A few years ago, when I was an undergrad, I was crunching data from R136 and found a pair of huge O-type stars that orbit each other with a period of slightly less than 2 days. 2 days! That was exciting.
October 22nd, 2008 at 10:14 pm
SteveG, good explanation.
A second reason for referring to events as happening when we see them is that we know, pretty precisely, when we saw them, but we don’t know the differences to most astronomical objects very accurately at all. If we start talking about what happened in 8320BC based on the assumption that the supernova we saw in 1680 is 10000 lightyears away, and it turns out to be 9200 ly, then we have to re-write all our descriptions, and as the distance is revised, you would have to know what the accepted distance was when whatever you are reading was written, and correct for it. It’s much easier if you just say “It exploded in 1680 and in 1783, William Herschel observed it as a disk of about 7.5″ in diameter.”
October 22nd, 2008 at 10:16 pm
P.S. That was a made-up fact for illustrative purposes only. I’m not sure which SNR Walruss was talking about, nor if Herschel ever saw it. Don’t try this at home!
October 23rd, 2008 at 1:30 am
SteveG – that things happen when we see them because of relativity is actually what I was thinking when I first considered this problem after reading the “blobs” post I mentioned. I’m glad I got to the right conclusion then, even though I rolled it back afterwards because it was difficult to grok!
Buzz – You make a very good point there! It’s even more poignant when we consider that not all scientists agree on the distance to all the objects out there – how could two disagreeing scientists discuss a particular event if one calls it “the supernova of ‘69″ and the other “the supernova of ‘41″? The timing of observations is much easier to agree on.
October 24th, 2008 at 4:54 am
What is the astrological significance of 12/21/2012 ?