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From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
The star that starred with star Jodie Foster is starring in a
new Nature article:
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20060410/vega_spa.html
She's spinning so fast she's about to fly apart (Vega, not
Jodie).
Ha! and our Vega is no Nova either... <g>
And, why was Vega specifically chosen for the movie, you ask - or
was that just an echo?
The implication is that it could related to us on some level -
maybe more than one level. As the article above suggests - we are
looking right directly down the pole of Vega - most
unusual -meaning that, among other things, it "could have been"
our progenitor star system - the one that ejected Sol over 5
billion years ago. If memory serves, only one in every 10,000
stars would be oriented towards us with this direct polar
alignment.
When some very large stellar objects eject material but do not
disappear themselves as in a Nova or SuperNova (possibly quark
stars intitially) that ejected material issues directly out of the
two poles. It is very likely that the progenitor star system to
ours, if it can be seen today, even after that many years will be
aligned directly polar to us as we would have retained as dynamic
relics, all the vectors of the original.
Vega is close to us, almost too close for that. And too young.
OTOH it might have ejected Sol, gone black for a while, and then
swallowed up a companion star so that it appears much younger than
it is. IOW there is an old core and a new skin there (something I
wish was doable in the human context!).
Vega does not look that old now, and Sol formed over 5 billion
yeas ago when out galaxy was young. But this surprising findings
about its instability may be a clue that is a much older object,
which now appears younger - having gained much new mass in ther
intervening billions of years, instead of decaying after its
initial fuel was expended.
OTOH we can never know what Carl was smoking at the time.
Astronomy teacher Mark Ritter wrote the a nice little article on
Vega which I have paraphrased below (as it was written for a
different time of year- and did not have the references to the
movie):
Tonight, if it is clear, there will be a bluish-white Vega parked
outside your house. You will have to look to the east. It shows up
there every spring.
It is a bright star in the constellation Lyra. It is called Vega,
derived from the Arabic name of the constellation, Al Nasr al
Waki, which means "swooping eagle." Philologically speaking, Al
Nasr al Waki begat Wega; Wega begat Vega; And there you are...
unless Sagan and his screenwriters are correct in implications
Vega begat Sol.
Let's look under the hood of this star and see what makes it run.
Vega is 25.3 light-years away, about 150 trillion miles as the
crow flies. But that's actually pretty close, considering our
galaxy is well over 100,000 light-years across. Why, Vega is
almost a neighbor.
Vega is just over three times the size of our sun now, but who
know what was there before our sun was here?
All the extra mass that makes it burn a lot more efficiently than
our own sun and as a result, Vega gushes more than 60 times the
energy that our star does, and a lot of that energy is from the
destructive ultraviolet side of the electromagnetic spectrum -
that is why it is blue. It could not harbor now the kind of life
we know and it should not be a long-lived star at that rate of
depletion.
Stars similar in brightness to Vega join her in making up the
distinctive Summer Triangle. Bright Altair and Deneb both round
out this pointy asterism that can be seen high in the heavens for
a couple more months.
Vega also has the distinction of being the first star photographed
by Earth-based paparazzi. In 1850, William Cranch Bond and John
Adams Whipple, in a day when it was apparently stylish to use
middle names, were the first to image the starry object.
On the night of July 16-17, they photographed Vega with the
telescope at Harvard Observatory using the early daguerreotype
process. But Vega was not content with that brief bit of
notoriety. More than 100 years later, she would play yet another
leading role in astronomical imaging.
Vega rotates, as all stars do. But we see it pole-on, looking down
on it as it spins. New, improved images of Vega reveal to us that
the star is surrounded by, well, a whole lotta crud. Since 1983,
we have been looking down at the full face of a big dirty,
spinning Frisbee, with bright Vega right in the middle of it, as
if she were brooding over a solar system in the making.
And just recently, it was discovered that some of this crud is
being blown away by the solar winds of the mother star. This
present sweeping implies that there was a recent rocky collision
there. Could it be that two young planets, possibly the size of
Pluto, have recently collided and vaporized into massive clouds of
dust?
And the fate of Vega? Because it is such a big star, it will
exhaust its fuel much faster than our star. It's really only a
relatively young stellar object - 350 million years old, plus or
minus - considerably younger than our 5 billion-year-old sun.
But according to present theories of star formation, Vega will
retire from stardom in about 650 million years, fizzling out into
a nondescript white dwarf. It will be lucky if it sees its 1
billionth birthday. However those theories do not nor cannot take
into account a stellar "rebirth"... i.e. as when a dying star in a
densely populated area of stars swallow up a companion.
But before she fades away, Vega will go out with at least one more
crowd pleaser. Because the Earth wobbles slowly on its axis, the
North Star is not always the one we see now, which is Polaris. In
about 10,000 years, we will have wobbled around enough such that
the new North Star will be you guessed it - Vega. GM will be long
gone, but some fully automated company will surely name their new
AG floater-car (the kind that Bruce Willis like to hack around in)
after it ...
