Beat this Hollywood: A Star Dies
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This is a pretty awesome image of a star collapsing (some collapse!) What I want to know, seeing as you are all such a clever and well-read bunch, is what the sentence "that happened about 800 years ago (or 5,800 years in absolute time)" means? What is the difference between the mentioned Absolute Time and, well, normal time? They say the star is 5,000 light years distant which says to me that the 5,800 number should be more right and that the 800 number seems way off. What is going on? :) regards, Paul Watson Cape Town, South Africa e: paulmwatson@email.com w: vergen.org
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This is a pretty awesome image of a star collapsing (some collapse!) What I want to know, seeing as you are all such a clever and well-read bunch, is what the sentence "that happened about 800 years ago (or 5,800 years in absolute time)" means? What is the difference between the mentioned Absolute Time and, well, normal time? They say the star is 5,000 light years distant which says to me that the 5,800 number should be more right and that the 800 number seems way off. What is going on? :) regards, Paul Watson Cape Town, South Africa e: paulmwatson@email.com w: vergen.org
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This is a pretty awesome image of a star collapsing (some collapse!) What I want to know, seeing as you are all such a clever and well-read bunch, is what the sentence "that happened about 800 years ago (or 5,800 years in absolute time)" means? What is the difference between the mentioned Absolute Time and, well, normal time? They say the star is 5,000 light years distant which says to me that the 5,800 number should be more right and that the 800 number seems way off. What is going on? :) regards, Paul Watson Cape Town, South Africa e: paulmwatson@email.com w: vergen.org
I think that there is a misprint or an error in this article. If the star is 5000 light-years ago, it means that the light of the event took 5000 years from our point of view to reach our eyes and so the event happened 5000 years ago. According to the principles on which relies the theory of relativity, there is no absolute time (you can have a look on the numerous papers explaining for example that if two events happened at the same time for an observer, for another observer moving relatively to the first observer it won't be the case). Relativity tell us that if two objects are in relative motion, the time doesn't flow at the same rate for the 2 objects. But in order to have something noticeable, the relative speed between the two object must be relativistic (close to the speed of light ~ 300000km/s). I don't think that this is the case there (the star seems to be in our galaxy and relatively close, and the relative speed of this star should be at max of a few hundred km/s). Serge
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This is a pretty awesome image of a star collapsing (some collapse!) What I want to know, seeing as you are all such a clever and well-read bunch, is what the sentence "that happened about 800 years ago (or 5,800 years in absolute time)" means? What is the difference between the mentioned Absolute Time and, well, normal time? They say the star is 5,000 light years distant which says to me that the 5,800 number should be more right and that the 800 number seems way off. What is going on? :) regards, Paul Watson Cape Town, South Africa e: paulmwatson@email.com w: vergen.org
Believe George's answer is correct. The picture shown is clearly from about 5000 years ago as it took the light that long to reach us. Their analysis of the picture is that the main event of the star dying had occured about 800 years earlier. Had we been alive on Earth in about 1300, then and looked up, we might have seen something. Major star events may generate a lot of light when it begins, but the process can take many years to complete. The speed of light is still a governing factor, and the distances are typically large. If our Sun exploded, it would take about 8 minutes before we even saw anything. SciFi movies always show such events happening like an exploding car. In fact it's a slow process, relatively speaking. The scenes from Deep Impact show the object approaching earth and exploding in a couple of seconds. However the details for an object traveling 30,000 miles an hour (about what it was supposed to do) would take 15 minutes just to traverse the distance from one earth diameter (about 8,000 miles) out to the surface (which is what is shown in the movie). If you could sit out towards the moon and watch such an event, it would look like slow motion... Ed
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This is a pretty awesome image of a star collapsing (some collapse!) What I want to know, seeing as you are all such a clever and well-read bunch, is what the sentence "that happened about 800 years ago (or 5,800 years in absolute time)" means? What is the difference between the mentioned Absolute Time and, well, normal time? They say the star is 5,000 light years distant which says to me that the 5,800 number should be more right and that the 800 number seems way off. What is going on? :) regards, Paul Watson Cape Town, South Africa e: paulmwatson@email.com w: vergen.org
of course it could be microsoft time :-D i.e. 10 seconds Remaining means 3 minutes elapsed in absolute time
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of course it could be microsoft time :-D i.e. 10 seconds Remaining means 3 minutes elapsed in absolute time
lol! I think your explanation best answers my question.
intTimeLeft = calcTime(intBytesLeft, intBytesProcessed, intTimeElapsed)
Response.Write "Time till installation complete: " & intTimeLeft * rnd(3000);P regards, Paul Watson Cape Town, South Africa e: paulmwatson@email.com w: vergen.org