Posted on 09/13/2024 11:45:25 AM PDT by Red Badger
ALMA images of the star R Doradus, taken on different days, show the movements of giant convection bubbles each as big as 75 Suns...ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/W. Vlemmings et al.
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The Sun is the biggest fish in our small pond of a solar system, but it’s a mere minnow compared to the whales that dwell out in the cosmos. New telescope images show a gigantic star casually blowing bubbles 75 times bigger than our Sun.
The matter in our neighborhood is distributed pretty unevenly – the Sun hogs some 99.8% of all mass in the solar system, making our planets look like little pebbles and gas balls. Put another way, you could cram 1.3 million Earths into the space the Sun takes up.
But if our local star ever wanted a humility check, it need only cast a glance out into the rest of the universe. Other stars at more advanced stages of their life cycles could eat the Sun for breakfast, spit it back up, and eat it again – which is basically what one red giant has been seen doing now.
Astronomers have used the ALMA telescope in Chile to image the surface of a star called R Doradus, located about 180 light-years away. As a red giant, it’s about 350 times wider than the Sun but has roughly the same mass. That’s because some stars go through a phase later in life after burning through their fuel supply when they swell up and essentially start to die. Our Sun is predicted to enter this stage in about 5 billion years’ time.
(Excerpt) Read more at newatlas.com ...
No-so-Tiny Bubbles Ping!................
Now, that’s what I call Bubble-licious!
R Doradus, My Doradus, Your Doradus, Their Doradus... :^)
El Doradus.................
It’s Tranya Time!
LED flashlight duct-taped in the path.
"Nearby" is a relative term and the speed of light is not nearly fast enough to explore very much.
There is the odd effect of time slowing down. If you could maintain a one g acceleration you could get to the Andromeda galaxy in 58 years ship time. Meanwhile 2 million years on Earth will have gone past.
But -us is very unusual for a Latin genitive and appears actually to be a Greek genitive.
The constellation is Dorado in the nominative case.
Bennett's New Latin Grammar, 28, cites the Greek third-declension proper noun Dido as having a genitive form Didus. So that seems to be what's going on with Dorado/Doradus.
Thanks VR!
Size comparisons of stars.
https://www.schoolsobservatory.org/learn/astro/stars/class/starsize
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