Comments on The Future of the Sun

How dare!

Why is it useless? Useless to you maybe. Better to interpret science as poetry than poetry as science.
The former is what highly literary but physics challenged people do, the latter is what psychos do.

Wow. This new timeline is gonna put some serious pressure on the Viaduct planning folks.

It is only useless for those that only see as far as the tip of their nose and the reach of their mind.

"the two galaxies are likely to collide in a few billion years - within the Sun’s lifetime".

Ah, but there's more poetry to be had. The Sun is currently about halfway through its projected life span. The projected time frame in the clip is close to the end of the Sun's life as we know it. The Sun will begin to run out of nuclear fuel, helium fuses into heavier elements, and the size of the sun continues to swell dramatically as it turns into a Red Giant.

From astronomynotes.com: "When the Sun becomes a red giant, Mercury and Venus will be swallowed up by the Sun and perhaps the Earth will too. Even if the Earth is not swallowed up, conditions on its surface will become impossible for life to exist. The Sun's increased luminosity will heat the Earth's surface so much that the water oceans and atmosphere will evaporate away."

We use a N-body/hydrodynamic simulation to forecast the future encounter between the Father's sperm and the Mother's egg, given current observational constraints on their relative distance, velocity, and mass. Allowing for a comparable amount of diffuse mass to fill the volume of the Local Group, we find that the two bodies are likely to collide in a few days - before the Mother's next period. During the first close encounter of the two bodies, there is a 12% chance that an embryo will be pulled from its present position and reside in the wall of the uterus. After the second close encounter, there is a 30% chance that an embryo will reside in the extended uterine wall, and a 2.7% chance that miscarriage will occur. Eventually, after the merger has completed, the embryo is likely to be scattered to the outer halo and reside at much larger radii (>30 mm). The density profiles of the embryo, uterus, and ambiotic fluid in the merger product resemble those of an early-term pregnancy. Our Local Group model therefore provides an prototype progenitor of a late—forming fetus.

since galaxies are almost all empty space, as collision between two is more like a dance than a crash. gravity pulling, swinging and intermingling stars, gas and rock. flowing into each other and emerging separated and different. Rather than poetry i would call it dance or perhaps sex.

only honey bucket would come up with such a stupid analysis like this. Anything that he doesn't understand is just art to him. maybe thats why he is so contently dilusional.

In a hundred years we'll all be dead.

I'm not an astronomer- just a lowly engineer, but it seems like understanding galactic collisions allows us better understanding into dark matter. Dark matter (probably) exists here in our galaxy and it might be important for us, someday, to understand how it behaves and whether it poses any existential threat to our survival.

(If it does pose a threat, of course, we'll have to declare a war on it and start spending billions of dollars right away fighting it on the surface of Pluto.)

See, I *told* you Charles has been writing poetry all this time.

It says when the sun gets old, it might become dotty, and perhaps wander off, out of our galaxy. There is only a 2.7% chance that a new galaxy will take our sun in and care for it. It is much more likely, if it does wander off, that the sun will simply slip between the cracks, with no fixed address or access to long term care.

Even if the sun does find a place in some other galaxy, they won't love it as we do. We would feel bad, but we will say we always thought there would be enough time to prepare, so we never gave it much thought until it was too late.