Here at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seatthle, the very well organised Villanova crowd (who apparently just gave Sean a medal or something), have an intriguing paper on quiescence in α Cen A
To cut a long story short, x-ray flux from α Cen has plummeted by almost a factor of 100, suggesting the star has entered a unspotted quiet state, possibly analogous to the Sun's Maunder Minimum, since as a first approximation x-ray activity in solar like main sequence stars correlates with the number of star spots, which anti-correlate with the stellar luminosity (fewer spots, less light, counter-intuitively).
This would be good to know fer sure, relevant for understanding solar variability.
More data needed.
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new week, new topic - actually we'll be doing a lot of extragalactic globulars and the mass function of the clusters, but we start with Guido summarizing what we know about the stellar mass function within the clusters - including mass segregation and differential mass loss.
Wheee.
Sometime…
it is still raining?!
so we have an east coaster telling us about actual data
on x-ray binaries
in clusters, globular clusters
in other galaxies...
there is an open-to-the-program-members blog over on the cluster09 wikispace.
It has some good summary of yesterdays in depth discussion on runaway…
"[The black hole] teaches us that space can be crumpled like a piece of paper into an infinitesimal dot, that time can be extinguished like a blown-out flame, and that the laws of physics that we regard as 'sacred,' as immutable, are anything but."
-John A. Wheeler
To an astronomer on any other…
More planet news from the Extreme Solar Systems conference
In addition to the Jupier like planet (did I mention that I like that result...?)
the California-Carnegie-AAT team has several more long period jovians, possibly with low eccentricity orbits.
Looking at known planet hosts, 179 stars, 25 are…