Piece of a brown dwarf
Ale
Posts: 2,363
In the movie Last Impact http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1227637/, a piece of a brown dwarf star impacts with the moon. Of course that is nonsense, but when we read about the composition of stars, aren't they too hot to actually have elements I mean nucleus and the corresponding electrons ?... The core, I think should be only nuclei no electrons...
The handle a small fragment, that should weight like a couple tonnes
, with bare hands... random thoughts
The handle a small fragment, that should weight like a couple tonnes
, with bare hands... random thoughts
Comments
Brown dwarfs are small stars that don't have enough mass to sustain hydrogen fusion. Larger brown dwarfs may have fusion of heavier elements, such as lithium. The mass of a brown dwarf is between 13 to 90 times the mass of Jupiter.
A fragment from a star will not have a high density, since it is no longer under extreme pressure from the gravitational attraction of the mass of a star. The earth and everything on it is made from star fragments.
Our sun for example is busy fusing hydrogen into helium, which releases energy hence all the light and heat etc we see coming out. This can happen because the size or rather mass of the sun is so huge that it squeezes the hydrogen together and it fusses into helium.
Brown Dwarfs are not massive enough to be cause fusion so they don't generate energy.
Would a lump of Brown Dwarf weigh tonnes? Not by the time you got out of the stars gravity, cool enough and into your hand, in fact it would just float away. As hydrogen gas does around here.
Exactly. That includes the elements that make up human bodies, too. Carl Sagan called it "Star Stuff."
And we got to get ourselves back to the garden.
CROSBY, STILLS, NASH & YOUNG 1969
Hope Carl gave attribution there.
You mean Joni Mitchell.
Don't know if he attributed it or not, though he was writing essays since the late 50s after graduation. Cosmos popularized the quotes, but a lot of it is was based on things he wrote years before. And of course, Sagan didn't come up with the concept. I've always liked "star stuff" over "stardust."
/derail off
Stardust rings with me because of an old song by Willie Nelson ....
"Sometimes I wonder why I spend the lonely nights dreaming of a song. The melody haunts my reverie, and I am once again with you. When our love was new, and each kiss an inspiration. But that was long ago, and now my consolation is in the stardust of a song."
Somehow that love went supernova: "Although I dream in vain, in my heart there always will remain my stardust melody, the memory of love's refrain."
The entire lyrics are found here among many places: http://www.metrolyrics.com/stardust-lyrics-willie-nelson.html
No. I mean Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. Woostock Festival 1969.
Not that I was there, sadly. I was only 13 and living in Australia at the time.
Can't stand Joni Mitchell.
"Stardust" is a lot more poetic, even romantic, than "star stuff". It's probably more technically accurate given the way stars tend to explode.
That's true, but they are commonly associated with other stars. In the case of stars large enough, a "parent" star in a binary system could supernova, taking out anything nearby. Fortunately for us, we're surrounded by fairly smallish stars, few of which would ever nova. That's what they tell us, anyway.
Joni Mitchell wasn't at Woodstock either. She wrote it from a hotel in NYC. True story!
LOL. Brown shrapnel.
Wonder how much velocity any supernova "shrapnel mass" could have.
Well I never. None of the CSNY pages I found with those lyrics made that attribution.
As for a piece of a brown dwarf? You want a piece of these guys?
That's a neutron star - star massive enough to collapse all the way down into one big nucleus
(overcoming the Pauli exclusion energy of the electrons). Much much more dense than a brown
dwarf which is plasma (+ve ions and electrons)
Mitchell and Graham Nash dated during the Woodstock time. That's where the connection is.
Anywho, I'm sure we all have some brown dwarf stuff/dust in us. I remember reading somewhere that each of us may have particles from thousands if not millions of different stars. We are truly extraterrestrial beings.
Here's an early recorded version of Joni Mitchell singing it. The last verse has the "carbon" bit.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRjQCvfcXn0
It's an interesting version, even if you don't like her. It's nothing like CSNY or the other covers.
Thanks for the Joni history. I'll have a listen later when I'm awake. "Can't stand" was putting to hard. Just not what I would normally listen to. Top marks for writing those lyrics though.
It's rather like "All along the Watch Tower". Great work by Jimmy Hendrix. Great lyrics by Bob Dylan, whom I really cannot stand to listen to.
Anyway, I just happen to have a few hand sized lumps of brown dwarf here if any one would like to make me an offer.
Do they keep calling out for "Noddy"?
C.W.
So, if the brown dwarf is only plasma, and the neutron star kicked the e- away... what is inside our own Sol (H, He, C, O, etc)? Because the spectra we normally record are the electron transitions... meaning there are intact atoms in there... at least at the surface where the temperature is not that high... it would be interesting to know how these elements are distributed...