Starship Asterisk*

moonshiner wrote:The image is in infrared so that one would have to check with calibrarion info of the Spitzer telescope to identify the temperature at which the glowing region shines. It must be very hot, probably in the millions of degrees celcius

ems57fcva wrote:If you zoom in on the center, you see bright dots with what look like cometary tails coming off of them. One is a 1:00 from the central star, and others are at 2:30, 3:00, and 7:30. Perhaps we are seeing a cometary system being destroyed by the young white dwarf at the center.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_Earth#Red_giant_stage wrote:
The Helix nebula is similar to what our Sun will produce in 8 billion years.

<<Once the Sun changes from burning hydrogen at its core to burning hydrogen around its shell, the core will start to contract and the outer envelope will expand. The total luminosity will steadily increase over the following billion years until it reaches 2,730 times the Sun's current luminosity at the age of 12.167 billion years. Most of Earth's atmosphere will be lost to space and its surface will consist of a lava ocean with floating continents of metals and metal oxides as well as icebergs of refractory materials, with its surface temperature reaching more than 2,400 K. The Sun will experience more rapid mass loss, with about 33% of its total mass shed with the solar wind. The loss of mass will mean that the orbits of the planets will expand. The orbital distance of the Earth will increase to at most 150% of its current value.

The most rapid part of the Sun's expansion into a red giant will occur during the final stages, when the Sun will be about 12 billion years old. It is likely to expand to swallow both Mercury and Venus, reaching a maximum radius of 1.2 AU. The Earth will interact tidally with the Sun's outer atmosphere, which would serve to decrease Earth's orbital radius. Drag from the chromosphere of the Sun would also reduce the Earth's orbit. These effects will act to counterbalance the effect of mass loss by the Sun, and the Earth will probably be engulfed by the Sun.

The drag from the solar atmosphere may cause the orbit of the Moon to decay. Once the orbit of the Moon closes to a distance of 18,470 km, it will cross the Earth's Roche limit. This means that tidal interaction with the Earth would break apart the Moon, turning it into a ring system. Most of the orbiting ring will then begin to decay, and the debris will impact the Earth. Hence, even if the Earth is not swallowed up by the Sun, the planet may be left moonless. The ablation and vaporization caused by its fall on a decaying trajectory towards the Sun may remove Earth's crust and mantle, then finally destroy it after at most 200 years. Following this event, Earth's sole legacy will be a very slight increase (0.01%) of the solar metallicity.>>

Boomer12k wrote:I looked at other IR shots. I think whatever you did, created some of them, they are not in the other shot...such as this one....http://quantum-cosmos.com/blog/2011/05/ ... -darkness/.... about 3/4 down the page. As you turned things another color...other things of that color can change too... even though not noticeable at the time. So, you might get small blobs. In the QC.com shot, there is a rather large red blob near the upper left of the "Eye"... where the arc begins. It is barely visible in yours. There are these things in the other shot, but they are brought out more in yours. I think they are of the Nebula, and not background stars, or foreground stars...so, I think it is your process....like when turning up the contrast and sharpness, etc...

Simply my opinion...Still AWESOME looking...
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geckzilla wrote:Yes, the 24 micron interior, which is red, is the warm dust. The browner parts, between 8 and 5.8 microns, are the cooler dust. Stars without or with little dust tend to shine at the shortest wavelengths, 4.5 and 3.6 microns, appearing cyan and blue. I'm not exactly sure about the nature of all the red dots surrounding the nebula. I want to say they're unrelated stars, but later on when I processed more Spitzer data, there weren't a lot of point sources like that again. Maybe they are actually parts of the nebula, or maybe I need to study more infrared data.

rwinrich@sbcglobal.net wrote:
Would such an expansion have ejected what ever cometary bodies existed in that region and left them to wander in interstellar space?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-major_and_semi-minor_axes#Average_distance wrote:
<<It is often said that the semi-major axis is the "average" distance between the primary focus of the ellipse and the orbiting body. This is not quite accurate, because it depends on what the average is taken over.

• 1) averaging the distance over the eccentric anomaly (q.v.) indeed results in the semi-major axis "a".
  
  2) averaging over the mean anomaly (the fraction of the orbital period that has elapsed since pericentre, expressed as an angle), finally, gives the time-average:
  

  

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