Comments on: The Ghost in the Shell

By: Vulcan Tourist

Vulcan Tourist — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 07:38:06 +0000

Jupiter and Saturn at the least have some hydrogen, eh? We should set up an intravenous feeding tube to feed dear old Sol some more of what it needs.

By: Celestial Fireworks: Star Eruption Caught By Hubble Telescope

Celestial Fireworks: Star Eruption Caught By Hubble Telescope — Mon, 09 Jul 2012 20:21:23 +0000

[...] Camelopardalis itself is much smaller than Hubble’s image would have you believe, as Discover Magazine notes: “The star itself is actually just a dot on this scale, but is so bright it overwhelmed [...]

By: Dan

Dan — Mon, 09 Jul 2012 17:48:18 +0000

From what I’ve read, Earth is going to be uninhabitable for humans and other mammals within 500 million years or so thanks to the constant rise in the sun’s temperature that’s occurring even now. Within a billion years all water will have boiled away. So we don’t have 6 billion years to play with. The age of animals is already well past its halfway point.

By: beerclark

beerclark — Sun, 08 Jul 2012 15:00:12 +0000

@ Doug Bostrom: B.A. mentions those spokes. That is from the camera itself. Or an effect from the camera viewing a star. They are not really there.
From B.A. in the article.
” Those light and dark radial spikes are not real; they’re artifacts of the way the camera sees light from a star …………. When I worked on Hubble I wrote a lot of software to do this kind of thing, and I saw spikes just like that in all my data. Irritating for science, but kinda pretty in the picture.”

My question is, how fast and how far is the gas?

By: Doug Bostrom

Doug Bostrom — Sat, 07 Jul 2012 21:39:12 +0000

Very curious to know what are the spokes or rays extending from the star?

By: [BLOG] Some Friday links « A Bit More Detail

[BLOG] Some Friday links « A Bit More Detail — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 18:03:47 +0000

[...] Astronomy’s Phil Plait looks at U Camelopardalis, a spectacularly dying red giant star 1400 light-years away that offers us a [...]

By: RobT

RobT — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 18:01:29 +0000

Actually, when I first saw the picture I thought it was of a Cloud Chamber, aka Wilson Chamber. The colour is what made me think it was something else.

By: Joseph G

Joseph G — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 17:29:31 +0000

@16 Jess Tauber: As long as we’re throwing out sci-fi scenarios, I wonder if planetary nebulae like this would make useful refueling stops for interstellar ships? Like a motherlode of hydrogen for ramscoop-type ships becalmed in relatively empty regions of the interstellar medium?
If I understand correctly, only relatively small stars (smaller than our own sun) are fully convective. That means that material blown off of a star with a core depleted of hydrogen will still be mostly hydrogen(?)

By: Wayne Johnson

Wayne Johnson — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 14:21:12 +0000

And this already happened a couple of times “here,” right? Our sun is a 3rd or maybe 4th generation star. I suppose that ejected material coalesced into dust rings and thence into planets.

Maybe the same thing happened at generation 2, and life evolved there. When that sun went nova, a few rocks survived to carry life from the new Heaven onto the new Earth.

That would explain why life appeared on Earth very quickly, as soon as the first rocks cooled enough to solidify.

By: adam frank

adam frank — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 14:11:57 +0000

And look, its spherical! That may be pretty rare in terms of what will eventually lead to a PN. No companion star then no bright visible shell (U Cam is pretty close though)