3 ms·
Fun facts about red dwarfs* If you look up on a dark night, you can see 5 to 10 thousand stars. For every star you see there are 8 red dwarves. Not one of th
by BMc2020 3y ago
Fun facts about red dwarfs*
If you look up on a dark night, you can see 5 to 10 thousand stars. For every star you see there are 8 red dwarves. Not one of them is visible to the naked eye.
No red dwarf has died of old age yet. They live trillions of years and the universe isn't old enough.
Proxima Centauri might not be part of the centauri system. It's orbit is so long (80,000 years) that we can't tell if it is orbiting Alpha and Beta or just drifting by.
Since they are flare stars (suddenly increase 10 - 50 percent in brightness), there were a few minutes in 2015 where if you knew where to look you could see it.
The book (and netflix show) the three body problem is about aliens from the centauri star system.
w/apologies to JRR Tolkein, who said the correct word is dwarves.
* this is all from memory, might want to verify it.
- sbierwagen 3y agoIt is funny to consider that most of the Milky Way is too dim to see. "Dark" matter. Of those 131 closest stars, only 22 are eye-visible. Only 6 are larger than Sol! WISE 0855−0714 is a mere 7.4 light years away and wasn't discovered until we started putting infrared telescopes in orbit. Heck, TRAPPIST-1 itself isn't eye-visible. It's only slightly bigger than Jupiter! But these systems are hugely overrepresented in exoplanet surveys-- since we've only been hunting for exoplanets for a decade or so via the transit method, most of them have been found orbiting red dwarfs: the host star is so dim that transits take a big chunk out of their light curve, and the planets huddled up close to the star orbit so quickly that you can get the required three transits in a mere ten years of observation time. It's a safe bet that there are gas giants like Neptune out there, but by the transit method it would take four centuries to find them! We invented the "hot Jupiter" category after Kepler launched, without nothing that we won't ever find "normal" gas giants without interstellar probes or space telescopes 10 km across.
- sph 3y agoThanks, I learned a few things from these facts. I also always get confused with red dwarfs and red giants, about time I educated myself: Red dwarfs are main sequence (i.e. in the prime of their life) stars that are small, and reddish. Red giants are old stars, and what will become of our Sun. This chart helped: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_evolution#/media/File%3AStar_Life_Cycle_Chart.jpg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_evolution#/media/Fil...