Starship Asterisk*

4dmaze wrote:
If you click on Betelgeuse, it mentions that the star will be short-lived and may not live another 10,000 years. Then it says that smaller stars live for trillions of years. That must be a mistake, correct?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_dwarf wrote:
<<A red dwarf is a small and relatively cool star on the main sequence, either late K or M spectral type. Red dwarfs range in mass from a low of 0.075 solar masses (the upper limit for a brown dwarf) to about 50% of the Sun and have a surface temperature of less than 4,000 K.

Red dwarfs are by far the most common type of star in the Milky Way galaxy, at least in the neighborhood of the Sun, but due to their low luminosity, individual red dwarfs cannot easily be observed. From Earth, not one is visible to the naked eye. Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to the Sun, is a red dwarf (Type M5, apparent magnitude 11.05), as are twenty of the next thirty nearest. According to some estimates, red dwarfs make up three-quarters of the stars in our galaxy.

As late-type red dwarfs are fully convective, helium does not accumulate at the core and, compared to larger stars such as the Sun, they can burn a larger proportion of their hydrogen before leaving the main sequence. As a result, red dwarfs have estimated lifespans far longer than the present age of the universe, and stars with less than 0.8 solar masses have not had time to leave the main sequence. The lower the mass of a red dwarf, the longer the lifespan. It is believed that the lifespan of these stars exceeds the expected 10 billion year lifespan of our Sun by the third or fourth power of the ratio of the solar mass to their masses; thus a red dwarf with 0.1 solar mass may continue burning for 10 trillion years. As the proportion of hydrogen in a red dwarf is consumed, the rate of fusion declines and the core starts to contract. The gravitational energy generated by this size reduction is converted into heat, which is carried throughout the star by convection.>>

Gowron wrote:This makes me cry every single time!

geckzilla wrote:

Gowron wrote:
This makes me cry every single time!

That's not very becoming of a Klingon...

4dmaze wrote:If you click on Betelgeuse, it mentions that the star will be short-lived and may not live another 10,000 years. Then it says that smaller stars live for trillions of years. That must be a mistake, correct?

Starchild wrote:I'm just surprised we're still around to be able to discuss this - relatively speaking we're not much bigger than a quark, compared to the (known) universe! Amazing little video!!! (I looked at everything, took me about an hour or so).

Ann wrote:
We are "mid-sized", and we can neither grasp the size of the universe nor the size of quarks.

tomatoherd wrote:Isn't this a mistake? :
near the end, at the universe level, it has the distance to the Hubble Deep Field being 12.7 billion light years. But this is within the "observable universe" circle that has an apparent diameter of roughly 8 times the Deep Field linear pictograph. Even if we put the Milky Way at the center, we do not observe 4 times 12.7 billion light years distant.

Chris Peterson wrote:

tomatoherd wrote:Isn't this a mistake? :
near the end, at the universe level, it has the distance to the Hubble Deep Field being 12.7 billion light years. But this is within the "observable universe" circle that has an apparent diameter of roughly 8 times the Deep Field linear pictograph. Even if we put the Milky Way at the center, we do not observe 4 times 12.7 billion light years distant.

The most distant objects we see (near the edge of the observable universe) are about 46 billion light years away. That's the physical distance you get when you combine 13 billion light travel years with 13 billion years of universal expansion.

Filbo wrote:The error which makes the observable universe 58x the size of the whole universe ought to be corrected!