Traveling the Sea of Night: Understanding Time and Distance in the Universe by Caruso Joseph R

Author:Caruso, Joseph R. [Caruso, Joseph R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bear Publishing
Published: 2015-07-21T16:00:00+00:00

Photo 6: Stars as Tomatoes ( photo by author )

Like people, every tomato and every star is an individual. We can make up any one of a number of taxonomies, but real nature never reproduces exactly the same thing twice. My wife likes to grow tomatoes, and they are all pretty much look the same if you don’t look too close. Most of them are sort of round and, at least for the cherry tomatoes, about the same size.

But if you look closely, every one looks subtly different. Some are oblate, like some stars. For example, Altair rotates so fast it is no longer spherical. Some have grown so close together that they have merged. Again, if some stars get inside the Roche distance, which is the minimum distance bodies can exist without falling apart—or, in some cases, actually merging into each other—they will be so distorted that they will exchange matter, the way W Ursae Majoris stars do.

And of course different species of stars, like different species of tomatoes, are of vastly different sizes. Take one of the very largest stars that we know of, VV Cephei. If it was a tomato and the Sun was represented by the size of a cherry tomato—25 mm (about an inch)—VV Cephei would be 45 meters (1,800 inches—that’s 150 feet) across. And that’s a big tomato! If it were to replace the Sun (the star, not the tomato) in the Solar System, it would engulf the entire Solar System, out to Saturn. Remember, though—the outer atmospheres of these infrared supergiants are so tenuous that you would have to travel millions of miles into them before you would even notice that you were inside a star.

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