Seriously good post

Testing out neologisms on us Phil?

That’s what we’re good for isn’t it?

they have multi-epoch images, so it would be nice to get a movie (e.g. http://sparky.rice.edu/~hartigan/movies/hh111jetc.gif)… but I don’t think anyone in our group has the expertise.

All this makes me wonder if the Sun looked like this, once, 4.55 billion years ago. There’s some evidence we were born in a gas cloud like this one, with dozens or perhaps hundreds or even thousands of other stars. Were we once swimming in a miasma of hydrogen, oxygen, sulfur, and nitrogen? Did our Sun shoot out twin beams of matter, tossed around by interstellar currents, blasted by ultraviolet light from massive stars, slammed by subatomic particles from their stellar winds?

I’d say that of all the occasions when stars like ours and HH 502′s progenitor form, some of them are amenable to what we could recognize as life. I’m pretty sure that at some time in the past our sun spent some time spewing dust and chucks outward from its poles. I have come to learn that there are few places within galaxies that are not subject to radiation of various frequencies at different amplitudes. At some time in the past our sun was young. Probably exuberant and wasteful, too. It may have been more energetic than we think or it may have been less. With more examination of data that determination will be made someday.

What is certain is that the data seem to show that there is nothing special about the sun and that most of the stars we can examine are also not special. The vast majority of them.

Is there life out there? Well, what should one suspect of a field sown with seed; one plant?

Twenty five years ago I managed to focus a cheap 400 mm refractor on this very place in the sky. The advantageous looking of the sky from the Wind River Mountains in Wyoming were so good that night . . . whoa! . . .

Hubble gotchu!

On the other topic, never heard it referred to as a dagger before. Sword, normally.

What we can conclude from this is that Orion dresses to the right.

~Rhaco

Perhaps this might help.

Nonetheless, the reference was nicely made, and instantly evocative. Thanks for the explanation on the central star, too–very cool.

Entirely by co-incidence, I was reading an old ‘Astronomy’ magazine earlier today & noticed this caption :

“A giant star’s final act is blow off mass and form a planetary nebula. At left is the inner portion of NGC 6826 showing the bright central star, an inner rim of newly ejected material, and two outer knots. The photo at the right shows the nebula’s outermost halo. The bright blobs are probably areas where the expanding gas is colliding with denser regions in the interstellar medium. Photo courtesy Philip Plait and Noam Soker, University of Virginia.

Source : Page 27, James Kaler’s article (series) “The Coolest Stars” in ‘Astronomy’ magazine, May 1990, Kalmbach Publishing.

So .. I know it was a long time ago now but Phil was that you? Or is there another Phil Plait doing astronomy somewhere?

***

PS. In case folks are wondering the coolest stars are the wonderful Mira variables and carbon stars. Nowadays, of course we’d have to add brown dwarfs to that list. That was one of a series by Jim Kaler that I very fondly recall reading and which helped really inspire my interest in astronomy & stellar astronomy especially – so neat connection there!