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Old June 18th 04, 11:30 AM
gswork
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Default Have you hugged a red dwarf lately?

Doug O'Neal wrote in message ...
gswork wrote:

You all probably know this but... big stars use fuel faster than
little ones and using our sun as a base you can quickly estimate the
longevity of other stars if you know their mass as a proportion of the
sun's mass. The calculations are findable via google.


I make that a lifetime of roughly over 4,000,000,000,000 years!
getting on for 400 times longer than our sun!


At a professional conference once, I saw an interesting poster paper
(stellar astronomy is my broad area of research interest) about how M
dwarf stars end their lives. My first thought: Gee, what a great paper
to write, since NO ONE can prove you wrong since none have died yet!


Great idea! Even geologists can get caught out when something
unexpected happens, but solar astronomers - especially those
researching dwarf stars - will never see their projections
countered.... actually that's a little sad!