"Dang! There go those pesky runaway stars again, Bob!"
"That's right, Will, and you'd think we'd have learned to look for them by now, but it just seems like a whole new surprise! And this time they're
goin' ballistic!! Ballistic stars are gonna be on The Hot Tamale Train in the science mags this year for sure!"
What
are astronomers looking for these days? And why is such a high percentage of their observations coming in the form of unexpected, ridiculously difficult to explain, unforeseen, not predicted by our standard model, and puzzling behavior formats? If they watched this space, their model might become a little better, or at least better at predicting and explaining what those punk runaways are really doing. Collimated jets crossing hundreds or thousands of parsec are nothing new in the EU zoo, in active or Seyfert galaxies, Herbig Haro objects and quasars.
Total Science, in Newton's time and way before, the stars moved so imperceptibly slowly relative to one another that they appeared to be in a never-changing relationship with each other. They were known as the fixed stars as far back as the Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations (especially Canis Minor). Those stars that were observed to have obvious motions relative to the field of fixed stars were called the
wanderers, or planets, from the Greek word. Newton certainly got the "immense distances apart from one another" right.
Mike - I've thought about pulling the plug and what ensues, too. I am not sure how fast that might happen, since time scales up along with length scales as one goes to plasma currents over cosmological distances. We have no idea how long the intergalactic web of filamentary currents has existed nor what its rate of change is, nor how long it will last or anything. If the current failed, perhaps there is a lag or capacitive effect that acts more like a dimmer than a switch. On the other hand, there is Don Scott's example of a star's changing its color and temperature and brightness and wandering around unpredictably on the H-R diagram in the course of two years! (see
The Electric Sky, FG Sagittae, p. 160).
If stars ever go out through insufficient electrical stress (w/m²) my thought it would "...not with a bang, but a whimper." What would be left would be a cooling, very large, gravity-bound gas giant. (someone's conjecturing here). In the dark. Could it collapse gravitationally? I do not believe it would, because if you plot the pull of gravity toward the center of a (homogeneous or isotropic) sphere, its pull decreases from the measure of the acceleration at the surface to zero at the center - a straight line relationship. No power, no logarithms, no supernova collapse and rebound through retarded shocks or any of that. If the EU is right and there is no fusion furnace at the center of the Sun, then all that high temperature and radiative pressure isn't actually there, and must not be needed to keep the hydrogen and helium + minor elements from collapsing inward. Maybe gravity yields a kind of surface tension; I don't know. It doesn't seem reasonable to me to extrapolate surface tension phenomena on a water globule floating in the shuttle up to a cooling sun ball. I'm pretty far out on the 3-meter board here.
J
