Have you ever heard that meme, “When looking at stars, you’re actually looking into the past. Many of the stars we see at night have already died.” Is this true?While you’re flipping through your Pinterest collection of cat-based inspirational posters, you might come across the saying, “When looking at stars, you’re actually looking into the past. Many of the stars we see at night have already died. Like your dreams.”Aww, that’s mean and sad. But is it true, Squidward? Are all these beautiful stars in our night sky long gone? Like our dreams?
Light travels at about 300,000 km/s, which is incredibly fast. Stars are so far away, even light from the closest stars will take years to get to us travelling at that speed.
Most of the stars we see with the naked eye are actually pretty close. The brightest in the night sky is Sirius in the constellation Canis Major. It’s only about 8.6 light years away.Which means if you crashed a whole bunch of spaceships into it tomorrow, we here on Earth wouldn’t see it happen for almost a decade.
Long after people had stopped wondering where you’d picked up all those spaceships, and why had you decided to crash them into a star instead of trading for gold pressed latinum, the spice Melange, or magical space cheese.One of the most distant naked eye stars is Deneb in the constellation Cygnus, which is almost 3,000 light years away. The light we’re seeing from Deneb started its journey towards us when ancient Rome was just a few hamlets and not even on the map for real estate speculators.
Credit: StellariumThis might seem like a really long time for those of us without immortal robot bodies, but a few thousand years is negligible to the age of a typical star, which is on the order of billions of years. So, Deneb, barring removal for an interstellar bypass, is probably still there.There are a few stars that could possibly explode in the near future, such as the red giant star Betelgeuse in the constellation of Orion.It’s about 650 light years away, if it had exploded a couple centuries ago, we still wouldn’t know. There are a few galaxies that can be seen with the naked eye, such as Andromeda, which is about 2.5 million light years away.
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Given that Andromeda has somewhere between 200 and 400 billion stars, it is almost certain that some of them have exploded in the last 2 and a half million years. But the vast majority of them have are still there, twinkling away. So it is possible that you could look up in the night sky and see a “dead” star, but almost all of the stars you see are perfectly active main-sequence stars, and will be for quite some time. Telescopes allow us to see much further out into space, billions of light years away. Given that a star like our Sun has a lifetime of about 10 billion years, many stars in most of the distant galaxies we observe died long ago. This cluster is 27,000 light-years away and lies farther than the center of our galaxy in the constellation Sagittarius.
Credit: NASA/ESA/I. Of Calif., Berkeley/Wikisky.orgBut don’t be sad, we’re not running out of stars. Because of this huge passage of time, it means many new stars have been born, and we just aren’t able to see them yet.
There are some stars even in the most distant galaxies that are still around.Smaller stars live longer than larger stars, and red dwarf stars can live for trillions of years. So when you look at the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, the most distant galaxies are around 13 billion years old, and the smaller stars in those galaxies are still shining. So don’t worry. Those stars are still there, and so are your dreams. Professor Brian Keating returns to Open Space to talk about the big concepts in cosmology, from inflation to the largest scale structures.
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Image: Emergency services at the scene of the attack. Pic: Nils Jorgensen/Shutterstockwas on the top floor of a bus when she saw a plain clothes police officer and members of the public taking the knife from the attacker.She told Sky News: 'We saw six people keeping someone on the floor. At one point someone said 'he has a knife'. And we thought, 'oh my god this guy was going to stab someone' because we saw people running away.' Then the police came and finally they removed the knife, then they shot the guy.' He was still alive and he tried to pull the black jacket off so I was able to see the vest he was wearing and it seemed like a very scary device, a bomb device.'
Image: A police boat patrols along the River Thames after the attacker was shot deadMr Basu said: 'As you would expect, due to the nature of the incident, we responded as though it was terrorist-related. I am now in a position to confirm that it has been declared a terrorist incident.'
Officers from the Met's Counter Terrorism Command are now leading this investigation. I must stress, however, that we retain an open mind as to any motive.' He warned that extensive cordons were likely to remain in place for some time - and urged the public to stay away from the area.In the hours after the terror attack, London Mayor Sadiq Khan praised the 'breathtaking heroism' of the passers-by who risked their lives to detain the attacker.Mr Johnson paid tribute to the bravery of the emergency services and the public.' Anybody involved in this crime and these attacks will be hunted down and will be brought to justice,' he said.Mr Johnson chaired a meeting of the government's emergency committee Cobra on Friday night and has cancelled his campaigning for the general election while he deals with the fallout from the attack.The incident comes nearly two-and-a-half years after the.
Eight people were killed and 48 others were injured when a van was driven into pedestrians on the bridge, with the van's occupants running into Borough Market and stabbing people in restaurants and pubs. Civilian pulled away before police shootAt the beginning of this month, the UK's terror threat level had been lowered from 'severe' to 'substantial' for the first time in five years. It meant an attack was considered to be likely instead of highly likely.The police and the security services have foiled 25 suspected terrorist attacks since Khalid Masood killed four people when he ploughed his car through pedestrians on Westminster Bridge before stabbing to death PC Keith Palmer as he guarded parliament.