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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2808 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 29, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action. Due to the almighty youtube algorithm I have watched somewhat more astronomy videos than usual.

Tabby's Star - 1,470 light years from the sun, dimming from time to time. Have some decent explanations involving exomoons and some indecent involving alien dyson sphere.

Przybylski's Star - 356 light years away from us, very unusual composition. It is full of short half life elements - so either something produces them or something put insane quantities of them there. Or it is aliens dumping ground.

Methuselah star - 200 light years away from us, at a time thought to be older than the universe, but now is revised down, still one of the oldest stars found. Probably not that noteworthy because due to the exponential change in main sequence life with linear change of the mass.

The sun - 8 light minutes aways from us. Notable with being the only place we know that has life (my opinion whether the life is intelligent or not depends if I have visited twitter yet or not any given day). And Venus - I think it is the most interesting place in the solar system right now after earth.

So do you think that our neighborhood is somewhat unusual, or there are huge gaps in our knowledge?

Any other interesting thing in the space close to us?

I think we're in something of a golden age for astronomy right now, thanks to better telescopes and better computing power to analyze their data. Plus youtube channels to communicate that stuff to us laymen. So maybe not a surprise that we're just now finding all these weird quirky stars that until recently would have been too small to identify. And of course it's easier to see those things if their nearby, compared to a distant galaxy where the best you could see is a huge quasar.

One thing unusual about our neighborhood is that it sits in the local bubble of unusually deep vacuum, which makes astronomy easier. And on a larger scale there's the local void where there's unusually few galaxies nearby.

One thing unusual about our neighborhood is that it sits in the local bubble of unusually deep vacuum, which makes astronomy easier. And on a larger scale there's the local void where there's unusually few galaxies nearby.

On the other hand, we're blocked from what'd be probably the most fascinating view by interstellar dust clouds between us and the galactic core. We win some, we lose some.

I just wish some astronomy apps had a simulation of "This is what we'd see if there weren't those damned clouds in between".

What's so interesting about Venus vs e.g. Enceladus?

What exactly is "our neighborhood" and what of stars that are beyond our neighborhood? This just looks like they picked 3 random peculiar stars.

Algol, the Demon Star. 94 LY away. Actually a 3+ star system; fades in and out over a three-day period as one eclipses another. Multiple Suns worth of mass and radius trading places every couple days.

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