An artist's impression of an outcast star zooming out of the Milky Way, ejected from the galactic center after a close encounter with a black hole.
Hey kids, it's time to play What's Scientifically Wrong With This Picture!
Posted on 02/10/2005 10:11:37 PM PST by budman_2001
A lonely young star has been discovered fleeing from the Milky Way galaxy at the most fantastic speeds ever seen, and Harvard astronomers say it is doomed to wander throughout the universe for the rest of its life.
"We've never before seen a star moving fast enough to escape the confines of our galaxy," said astrophysicist Warren Brown, its co-discoverer. "We're tempted to call it the outcast star."
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Believe it or not, it was probably clocked with the same technique that a police radar gun uses...
Police radar guns work by bouncing microwaves (IIRC) off your car and then measuring how much the reflected wave's frequency has been shifted by due to its encounter with your moving car.
Astronomers can use the exact same principle to determine how fast stellar objects are moving towards/away from the Earth, except that they don't need to bounce anything off the star, since the star is conveniently emitting its own light which can be analyzed to determine how much its frequency has been shifted up/down from its "base" frequency due to the motion of the star as it emits the light.
An artist's impression of an outcast star zooming out of the Milky Way, ejected from the galactic center after a close encounter with a black hole.
Hey kids, it's time to play What's Scientifically Wrong With This Picture!
Some Free Republic members make the Chief Librarian of the Ancient Library of Alexandria look like a pamphlet distributor.
I don't think the doppler effect is as pronounced with a hair dryer as it is with a radar gun. For one thing, the hair dryer really needs to be plugged in, and even a gentle breeze can cause a false reading. There is a low conviction rate on hair dryer tickets.
1) The star wouldn't have a tail.
2) (Just guessing here) The trajectory should probably be in the same plane as the rest of the galaxy.
3) If Al Gore was president, this never would have happened.
Science repeats itself: http://www.netroglycerine.com/surprise4.html.
See post #27. Apparently it's the heat that actually does the work.
Bingo! There would be absolutely no reason for it to have "streamers" of gas coming off it, no matter how fast it was going through the vacuum of space.
2) (Just guessing here) The trajectory should probably be in the same plane as the rest of the galaxy.
Nah -- it could have gotten flung off in any direction with respect to the plane of the galaxy.
Which happened how many eons ago? Is there anything in the 'center' of the Milky Way - now? Does "now" really mean anything given the fixed speed of light?
Having nothing else to do, I was just thinking about what would happen if an entire galaxy was flung by a black hole and slammed into another galaxy, and remembered a thread about colliding galaxies a year or so ago. It had a picture, too (hope they were standing a safe distance away).
So now I'm wondering: When two galaxies collide, do they make a loud noise?
call it...the hillary clinton runaway....
awful movie....but good song by Lee Marvin....
If no one is listening, no.
The star seems to have developed a knowledge of its absolute velocity through the ether?
This star could have originated somewhere else, and just be passing through our galaxy.
Gore said that the streamers are from the melting polar caps due to the natives screwing up their planet with global warming. That it is their own fault that they are being outcast from the galaxy 'cause they continued to drive their SUV's.
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