The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes:
Flood, Fire, and Famine
in the History of Civilization
by Richard Firestone,
Allen West, and
Simon Warwick-Smith
Posted on 12/02/2003 6:35:50 PM PST by NormsRevenge
Bible speaks of a day when those we would call "liberals" and "socialists" (and muslims) have a major "oh shit" thing hiding in caves and running away from signs in the skies...
Indeed it is humbling to know that what we see up there may have already changed and be INCOMING! Local solar activity may be (and probably is) influenced by activity in other stars all throughout the galaxy and beyond.
Science is fun!
Don't press this with liberals. They find the TRUTH "offensive".
I thought that would have been Robert Reich!
Mark
Sorry, I guess you didn't get the memo... You (and everyone else) are simply figments of my imagination... When I die, sorry, but you will all vanish in a *poof!*
Sorry to rain on your parade.
Mark
Well, while they were riveted on this one, an amateur from Japan spotted this one:
Brightest supernova in a decade captured by Hubble Space Telescope
About 150 solar masses, they speculate:
http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0310860
The observed masses of the most massive stars do not surpass about 150Msun. This may either be a fundamental upper mass limit which is defined by the physics of massive stars and/or their formation, or it may simply reflect the increasing sparsity of such very massive stars so that observing even higher-mass stars becomes unlikely in the Galaxy and the Magellanic Clouds. It is shown here that if the stellar initial mass function (IMF) is a power-law with a Salpeter exponent (alpha=2.35) for massive stars then the richest very young cluster R136 seen in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) should contain stars with masses larger than 750Msun. If, however, the IMF is formulated by consistently incorporating a fundamental upper mass limit then the observed upper mass limit is arrived at readily even if the IMF is invariant. An explicit turn-down or cutoff of the IMF near 150Msun is not required; our formulation of the problem contains this implicitly. We are therefore led to conclude that a fundamental maximum stellar mass near 150Msun exists, unless the true IMF has alpha>2.8.
Sooooooo . . . THANK YOU VERY MUCH, mvpel!! Very interesting. I knew there was some kind of limit. :-)
Wow, a 750+MSun star would be an awesome thing, if such exists. No doubt about that! (Wouldn't want to be ANYWHERE near it when it went supernova either!)
The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes:
Flood, Fire, and Famine
in the History of Civilization
by Richard Firestone,
Allen West, and
Simon Warwick-Smith
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