

Runaway Star Found Hurtling Through Space - anya
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-501465_162-20029397-501465.html
This is the sort of story that tickles the delight of the amateur astronomer in all of us. Late Monday afternoon, NASA/JPL sent around a rare picture taken by its Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer of a star whose mass is about 20 times that of our sun.Astronomers say that the star, Zeta Ophiuchi, was given the boot by its former companion, another massive star, sending it hurtling at a clip of 54,000 miles per hour through space dust.
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rbanffy
It depresses me a little knowing that, even if we mastered faster-than-light
space travel and I were to stand just a couple light-hours from the place, all
I would see would be some stars, as the glowing gas of the bow shock is
invisible to human eyes.

We need better hardware.

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iwwr
The night sky from inside a nebula won't be very different since the gas/dust
particles are very tenuous. You get a better view from further out.

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rbanffy
Indeed. A couple light-hours is closer to the star than the bow shock region.
A better view would be from about 50 times as far (wild guess, but we aren't
really talking about going there anytime soon). Still, all a human would see
would be some stars against a black background. Most of the action is only
visible outside the visible spectrum and even then, it's very faint.

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akheron
As one of the comments on the page says: "Well, it's a nice new picture but
we've known its size, speed and origin for a very long time. Definitely not
news."

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeta_Ophiuchi>

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iwwr
54K miles per hour is barely 24km/s, or about 10% of our sun's galactic
orbital velocity.

