Posted on 12/01/2014 6:50:42 AM PST by Heartlander
A star that's almost a secret, almost well-hidden in the kosmos at large. It's invisible to the naked unaided human eye only fifty light years away.
Would that make the sun 2 million light years across? Kinda big. Only takes that photon 8 minutes and change to get here, 93 million miles, give or take.
Class M stars burn much hotter than our star, and with a peak wavelength in red suggests that they are giants. I’m an astronomy rookie so I will defer to your understanding but I thought that stars that exhibit these characteristics are significantly larger than the Sun.
I remember reading many years ago of a mnemonic to remember the order: "O, be a fine girl, kiss me."
Probably that is now illegal to quote as sexist and heteronormative.
The idea is the photons formed within the sun take along time working their way out from the interior of the sun because they are continually bouncing off of interior solar matter.
“Would that make the sun 2 million light years across?”
I think is not be due to physical distance, but to gravity. The gravity at the center of the Sun is much greater than at the surface, so if a photon was generated at the center, it’s path through spacetime would be seriously “warped”, and take longer to travel.
No, it doesn’t. A “light year” is based on a photon traveling thru a vacuum, not thru a dense medium involving frequent energy form transitions & related reactions. Think of your running speed thru thin air vs molasses or solid rock.
And it’s comments like “would that make the sun 2 million light years across?” that are face-palm infuriating when trying to have a sane discussion about cosmology. If you don’t grasp the basics of physics, stop trying to argue that it’s science that’s stupid about reality.
That argument is akin to saying the number 12 is not unremarkable precisely because it is the only number equally close to 11 and 13; the criteria for “remarkable” being relevant only to a short-lived life-form eeking out its existence on the thin crust of an orbiting planet, and not “remarkable” in any absolute terms such as size, rotational velocity, percentage of heavy elements, etc.
How many class M planets are there?
You’re thinking of a star like Betelgeuse, which is an M2Iab supergiant star that is not a star on the Main Sequence as I described. The M designated the Harvard Spectral Classification for a red spectral type and the Arabic numeral 2 designated the hotter end of a range of 0 to 9. The Yerkes Spectral Classification of Iab is the Roman numeral and alphabetic letter designated ab class of luminosity associated with a class of supergiant stars not on the Main Sequence.
An example of a red Type M star which is on the Main Sequence of stars is AD Leonis M3.5e V. Harvard Spectral Classification M and Yerkes Spectral Classification Roman Numeral V for Main Sequence so-called dwarf stars.
With so many factors determining whether a planet has a life-sustaining atmosphere, there is little chance that we will ever find other intelligent life.
You assume that photons travel at 186,000 miles per second no matter what the environment.
What lies beneath the surface of our Sun is so dense, so electromagnetically charged and the gravity so immense that photons...and every other particle...behave in much different ways than we observe here on Earth. Thus, it takes a very long time for a photon to travel from the Sun's core to the surface.
“With so many factors determining whether a planet has a life-sustaining atmosphere, there is little chance that we will ever find other intelligent life.”
Even assuming odds of one in a million when eliminating various factors, there should be something on the order of billions of planets and non-planetary locations in the Milky Way Galaxy alone where life exists and/or existed, millions of locations where intelligent life existed in this galaxy, and thousands of civilizations of intelligent life in existence at this moment in just this one galaxy. Then you multiply thousands or millions of civilizations per galaxy in the present or the past by the hundreds of billions of galaxies, and you get an awful large number of civilizations with intelligent life in the deep space beyond the Earth and its Solar System.
Ah, ok that makes sense to me now. Yes I was thinking of the red giants that had moved off of the MS. Thank you for helping me understand it better now.
Don’t forget, the Sun will move off the Main Sequence and become an M III Red Giant and move back and forth through some phases as it burns Helium and then moves into the final white dwarf terminal phase. See the Wikipedia article on the Sun in the area discussing the life cycle and Main Sequence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun
Only Spock knows for sure
If nothing else, it’s the only star in the universe known to support life.
That makes it unique beyond comprehension.
It is my stupidity that questions statements that are generalized and based on calculations that are based on assumptions, some of which are imagined to be truth, while others are based on mathematical models of what they think happens, but have never reproduced them because of the extreme conditions imagined..
Photons move like a particle and interact like a wave.
The mathematical analysis that people draw on to make the 1000 year statement leave out a few important tidbits. Namely that some of the energy of a particular photon created at the core (Or possibly anywhere in the globe, who knows?)where fusion is taking place within, is released from the core to the surface in only a few minutes, (once again supposed, theoretically) and what eventually reaches the surface is nowhere near resembling what was the original photon created at the core as a result of fusion of H to He.
To generalize the statement by saying a photon take several thousands of years to get to the surface is not factual, in fact misleading, and not really "cosmology" supporting statement.
Thanks for the reply.
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