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Stars may collide in a “red nova” in 2022
- IgorPartola 10y agoOr had collided in the year 222 :)
- cyberferret 10y agoThis is the "time travel" aspect of astronomy that I find extremely fascinating. I was just talking to my young sons the other day as we were watching the sunset that we are seeing something that happened 8 minutes ago. Cool to see them trying to get their young brains around this concept...
- daveguy 10y agoThe sunset you were seeing didn't happen 8 minutes ago. Sunsets are an interaction of the sun with your perspective position on earth and line of sight. The sunset was happening right then -- the light that was involved in the sunset had been emitted from the sun 8 minutes ago. The last blip of the light you saw disappear over the horizon was a view of a corner of the sun from 8 minutes ago, but the sunset was happening essentially at that moment. </pedantic>
- troels 10y agoYou're missing an opening tag.
- Nuzzerino 10y agoIts similar to this, where typically no opening tag is provided. https://www.google.com/amp/s/madfileformatscience.garymcgath.com/2011/12/07/sarcasm-tag/amp/?client=ms-android-verizon https://www.google.com/amp/s/madfileformatscience.garymcgath...
- itsbits 10y agoconsidering it is thousands of light years off us, it's probably like before humans exists..
- cyberferret 10y agoApproximately 1800 light years away, therefore he is right, if it collided in our year 222AD (well within existence of humanity), then it would appear in our skies in 2022 (ish).
- Achshar 10y agoSince speed of light is the defaco speed of everything and hence reality itself, it's for all intents and purposes yet to happen even if technically it's already happened. That's kinda how relativity works, if it hasn't happened for us, it hasn't really happened.
- euyyn 10y ago> Since speed of light is the defacto speed of everything and hence reality itself This is false, and so is the rest of that reasoning.
- Achshar 10y agoIn what sense? If we can't reach some specific space/time coordinate, it's for all intents and purposes unreachable.
- euyyn 10y agoWell, the speed of light isn't the speed of anything with mass. The rest is only indirectly connected to that. The collision did already happen, from our frame of reference. Its light arriving to us will be just a confirmation. From some other frame of reference (one moving very fast in the line that joins Earth and the collision), it might not have happened yet.
- fsiefken 10y agoAs Halley's comet was regarded as an omen for the defeat of the Saxon king Harald and the 1006 bright supernova in Scorpio was regarded as a bad omen and was accompanied with wars and famine in both Europe and Arabia and the 1997 Hale-Bopp comet resulted in the Heaven's Gate suicides, I wonder how astrologers or all kinds of semi-religious groups would regards this upcoming spectacle. Tycho Brahe predicted succesfully that the 1572 supernova would herald the decline of the Roman Catholic Church. What will happen in 2022, a New World Order... or another day of the Triffids? http://www.astro.com/astrology/aa_article141030_e.htm http://www.astro.com/astrology/aa_article141030_e.htm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stars_in_astrology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stars_in_astrology
- daveguy 10y agoGood point. I think that depends entirely on how batshit crazy the human response is. Hopefully very little, but 5 years is plenty of time for people to come up with some self fulfilling prophecies / build a cult.
- Cpoll 10y agoYou said it yourself though; we've gone from "bad omen blamed for catastrophic event" to "a handful of cult members committed suicide". With that extrapolation, I can't imagine this will be the catalyst for much.
- jcrites 10y agoFascinating. It will be wondrous to see if it occurs. It also reminds me of a premise in one of my favorite science fiction novels, Diaspora by Greg Egan. In the story, the characters are monitoring the orbit of a binary star system. The orbit is decaying and a collision is expected at some point. However, soon the characters realize that the orbit is decaying far faster than expected. Extrapolating, and discovering new properties of stellar physics, the characters realize that the stars are mysteriously losing angular momentum, which will lead to them spiraling downward into a prompt collision that will produce supernova-scale energies. The binary star is in Earth's neighborhood, so this will put all life on the planet at risk. It will be brighter than the sun in daylight. There's a great deal more to the plot than that (I don't want to spoil it) -- that's just the event that kicks things off. It's a great book and I'd highly encourage all sci-fi fans to read it. Hopefully nothing like this happens in real life, and we are confident and correct about the amount of energy that will be released :-) While thinking about these topics, it is difficult not to ponder the frailty of life, and the astonishing vastness and expanse of the cosmos. How easy it would be for a star to snuff out all life on a world.
- david-given 10y agoSeconded --- it's a great book. Egan has an amazing talent for off-handedly mentioning and then casting aside multiple mind-expanding ideas per chapter that other authors would expand into a complete novel. Non-spoiler: I believe this book features the biggest sculpture in fiction. (Currently reading _Incandescence_.)
- pavel_lishin 10y agoIt's been awhile since I've read it; I'm going to try and ask this question in a spoiler-free way: are you talking about the thing they end up 'chasing' through the 4-6-4-6 (or arguably 3-5-3-5, etc)?
- netcraft 10y agothats it. Another vote for it being a great book - lots of amazing ideas.
- life2hack 10y agoIf it happens as it is predicted, it will be a real treat for us.
- tonylemesmer 10y agoI read that as "threat" then I re-read it and calmed down.
- life2hack 10y agoor it can be a threat to.
- triclops200 10y agoMuch better article with more details on the actual system and some more background: http://www.businessinsider.com/red-nova-stellar-merger-prediction-sky-2017-1 http://www.businessinsider.com/red-nova-stellar-merger-predi...
- DrScump 10y agoThat one has a cool time-lapse of V838 Monocerotis' expansion nebula.
- planteen 10y agoDoes anyone know of a link to the conference paper about this?
- dark_star 10y agoI think this is the conference paper: http://www.calvin.edu/academic/phys/observatory/MergingStar/MolnarEtAl2017.pdf http://www.calvin.edu/academic/phys/observatory/MergingStar/... (Linked to from here: http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/two-stars-are-about-smash-into-each-other-explosion-will-be-visible-naked-eye-1599749 http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/two-stars-are-about-smash-into-each...) The star system in question is KIC 9832227, about 1800 light years away from us: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KIC_9832227 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KIC_9832227
- planteen 10y agoAwesome, thanks so much!
- kordless 10y agoHere's the binary they are discussing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KIC_9832227 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KIC_9832227 Here's Tabby's star: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KIC_8462852 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KIC_8462852 I'm not sure how to do the calculations on distance between the two, but I'd estimate this binary is well under 1,000 light years from Tabby's star given the constellation, RA, declination and distance are all close. Edit: Added a zero as I'm not sure of the error margines on distance measurements.
- chillly 10y agoI wonder if the event will be big enough to show up in gravity waves. There will be three detectors at least 'listening'.
- daveguy 10y agoIs that a regular event they listen for? I thought it was black holes colliding and a couple of average size stars wouldn't be significant enough to cause a blip. It would be awesome if they could tie a gravity wave event with an event visible to the naked eye.
- chillly 10y agoThey don't listen for specific events, they wouldn't know when they were going to happen. They wait for any detectable gravity wave to occur. I just don't know what the magnitude and distance of such an event would show up.
- detritus 10y agoWould the increased proximity of these two stars make up for this? I'm under the impression that the gravity wave detections so far have been colliding black holes billions of light years away - if these two are less than two thousand, might they be detectable (with current tech)?
- soheil 10y agoReminds of WR 104 [1] binary star system. When the two stars collide in the next 100 years there is a chance earth could be in the path of its gamma-ray bursts that can potentially end life on earth. The cool thing about it is that we won't know when it happens (already has happened because of limit of speed of light) until the gamma rays have reached earth which means there will be just a flash of light and then it's all over and it could happen anytime. Talk about existential thread to life. However, there isn't a very high likelihood of it happening though. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WR_104 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WR_104
- rokosbasilisk 10y agoWow scary. Is there any way to survive it ? Its also kinda of sad, but for a second I felt kinda happy reading this, knowing at least I wouldnt be in student debt
- jawilson2 10y agoThis is so depressing. I had the exact same thought. "I'll miss my kids, but at least no more Sallie Mae, so I've got that going for me."
- rm_-rf_slash 10y agoThere is so much going on today that makes me fearful for the existential future of humanity: climate change, nuclear weapons, resource depletion, artificial intelligence, to name a few. But strangely enough, a ticking cosmic countdown makes me feel oddly at peace with an ultimate future of extinction. I can only hope that the end of humanity will not be wrought by its own hands. Makes me want to enjoy my time alive more, with the people I care about.
- basch 10y agoit would probably be more impressive if humans led to their own extinction, than if cosmic forces ended us.