Ask an (Amatuer) Astronomer

[KageJim]

I thought I'd do some "reverse research"...offer my services, and see if anyone needs them.

Anyway, I love astronomy. I do. So, if you have any questions about orbits, stellar evolution, black holes, comets, anything at all, JUST ASK!

Even if you're just curious and it's not directly related to one of your stories.

The worst that can happen is I don't know the answer to your question.

[nashira]

Oooh! I love you (awesome idea).

...except I have a fairly good idea of this stuff myself and happily read for hours on it so don't have much to ask. Hmmn.

[Dwiesel McAllister]

:D You could be the NiH version of Jack Horkheimer! (I'm assuming you know who that is...)

[KageJim]

No, I don't...

[KeinesV]

First, consider this image.

http://abstrusegoose.com/strips/electromagnetic_leak.PNG


Then, tell us what we might expect from the Aldebaran stormtroopers come to reinforce the nazis ?

[KageJim]

I have no idea. If they were getting here anytime soon, they'd have to have relativistic speed spacecraft, and if they did, I don't know what they would find interesting about Nazis or Earth.

Also, being that Aldebaran is in its final stages of stellar evolution, I highly doubt any life would be living there, let alone thriving.

[KeinesV]

They would note how similar the nazi stormtrooper uniforms are to their own stormtrooper uniforms, naturally, and the nearing death of their own star is obviously the reason for their imperialist expansion of course.

[KageJim]

You miss my concerns with the dying star aspect: a star when it grows old expands greatly, making it so that any planets that had previously been habitable would be smoldering rocks with no water or even atmosphere. (This will happen to the Earth in about 4,000,000,000 years.)

So, if anyone wereliving on a planet around Aldebaran, they would have to have developed after the star left its main sequence and after whatever planets that had been too cold warmed up to a reasonable temperature for life. That, however, (supposedly) took billions of years on Earth. Normally stars are only at the stage of their evolution which Aldebaran is at for roughly several million years (I could be off on that number, but it is a quite short time, astronomically speaking), which would make life existing there highly unlikely.

P.S. No, I can't just take a joke, not when science is involved.

[Dwiesel McAllister]

Assuming these were some sort of highly evolved thermophiles, though? Strange things exist on earth; I can only assume that stranger things exist elsewhere in the universe.

Contrary to Gene Roddenberry's opinon, they wouldn't be remotely humanoid. Is it possible they would view telecasts of the bombings at Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and would have thought that a planet undergoing such a nuclear disaster, purged of the vast majority of its indigenous species (so they might think, expecting the nuking to go on for quite some time afterward) would be a great place to set up a new colony?

[KageJim]

Yet again my point is missed...

Aldebaran is at a horrible time in its life cycle to harbor life.

It had, at one time, been not too unlike the sun (about twice as massive, which is comparable as far as such things go), but has since become much more volatile. So, a planet that had once been at a given temperature, is now far, far hotter. The change in a star when it jumps off the main sequence is fairly rapid. Let us put it this way: Aldebaran is now probably 40 times the diameter it was a billion years ago. A star that would have previously been in any sort of Earth-like orbit would now likely be INSIDE the star. If a civilization had formed on a farther out planet, they would have former under very cold conditions, and now it would actually be much, much warmer; they would very likely die out before any sort of adaptions could be made (biological or technological), imo.

The only (likely) way life could survive in that system, is if they lived on a closer planet and then moved to a different one as the star expanded. This would be a massive undertaking, although if you consider that they can travel the 382,000,000,000,000 miles to Earth, I suppose moving their entire civilization to another planet would be cake.

Lastly, Aldebaran has a companion star: a tiny dwarf star at 200 AU distance from the primary. It's small enough and far enough out that normal planets with normal orbits could exist, but I think it makes them a smidge less likely.

My real point: if you were to speculate that life existed somewhere in the cosmos, Aldebaran is a poor place to pick.

[Dwiesel McAllister]

How about HD 217107? That looks like a nice yellow one.

[KageJim]

Right type of star, however it has a Jupiter-sized planet orbiting the star very close to it. Astronomers still do not know how this happens, or why. The leading theory is that a gas giant closes in from a more typical orbit towards the star, which would throw any other planets into deep space as it spiraled towards the star.

There is a second known planet, but it is about 4 times the Earth-Sun distance (known as an astronomical unit or AU). It could harbor life, at least on one of its moons (it's also a gas giant planet)...assuming it has moons.

Much more likely than Aldebaran, still.

[Dwiesel McAllister]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20090812/sc_space/newfoundplanetorbitsbackward

I found this and thought you might be interested, Jim. Your thoughts on this planet's peculiar retrograde orbit?

[KageJim]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20090812/sc_space/newfoundplanetorbitsbackward

I found this and thought you might be interested, Jim. Your thoughts on this planet's peculiar retrograde orbit?

I'll comment off my thoughts as I read the article:

1. How do they know which way the star is rotating? Perhaps the star is the anomaly, not the planet.

2. I'm skeptical about the size and density of the planet. I find it highly implausible that a planet would be that...non-dense. Perhaps extreme tidal forces could heat the gases it's comprised off and cause lareg degees of thermal expansion.

3. How did they measure the diameter of the planet?

Conclusion: Most likely it's a planet that was wandering through space and was caught by the star. It might be possible that the protostellar disk simply formed "backwards" causing the planet to appear to be orbiting in retrograde (this is purely speculative, as I have no idea if they can determine this data or not).

[KeinesV]

I'm speculating nothing. The Aldebaran threat is REAL. They don't need their stars system to be habitable anymore, they have thousands more.

[AXJ]

I'm an aquarius and my wife is a sagitarius. Can you recommend any approaches that will help us get along better in the mornings?

























:p

[KageJim]

My only suggestion would be to pay less attention to astrology.

[TwistedFirestarter]

I'm an aquarius

Oooh, horoscope buddies! *high-fives*