New type of star

I saw an article in USA Today yesterday about a new type of star
discovered...not massive enough to become a black hole, and more
massive than the sun; the artical referrenced quark material, but the
find was not a quark star. Any comments or links to this?

GSWeb8 wrote in news:6887f36b-2e63-4db1-bb8e-
:

I saw an article in USA Today yesterday about a new type of star
discovered...not massive enough to become a black hole, and more
massive than the sun; the artical referrenced quark material, but the
find was not a quark star. Any comments or links to this?

http://www.space.com/scienceastronom...-new-star.html
New Star Found in Big Dipper
By SPACE.com Staff

posted: 09 December 2009
09:16 pm ET
The Big Dipper has a new star.

One of the stars that makes the bend in the ladle's handle, Alcor, has a
smaller red dwarf companion, new observations have revealed.

Alcor is a relatively young star twice the mass of the Sun. Stars this
massive are relatively rare (less than a few percent of all stars), short-
lived, and bright.

Alcor and its cousins in the Big Dipper formed from the same cloud of
matter about 500 million years ago, something unusual for a constellation
since most of these patterns in the sky are composed of unrelated stars.

Alcor looks to be in the same position in the Big Dipper with another star,
Mizar from the perspective of a viewer on Earth. In fact, both stars were
used as a common test of eyesight — being able to distinguish "the rider
from the horse" (as the two stars are unofficially known) — for ancient
Arab, Roman and English warriors. (Mizar is the brighter of the two stars
and can still be seen with the naked eye, while Alcor, a little fainter,
would take relatively dark skies to see.)

One of Galileo's colleagues observed that Mizar itself is actually a
double, the first binary star system resolved by a telescope. Many years
later, the two components Mizar A and B were themselves determined each to
be tightly orbiting binaries, altogether forming a quadruple system.

Now, Alcor, which is about 3 light-years away from the four stars of the
Mizar system, also has a companion.

Watching for movement

In March, a group of astronomers attached a coronograph and adaptive optics
to the 200-inch Hale Telescope at the Palomar Observatory in California and
pointed it to Alcor. (Adaptive optics counteract interference from Earth's
atmosphere by making swift, real-time changes in the shape of a telescope's
mirror during observations.)

"Right away I spotted a faint point of light next to the star," said Neil
Zimmerman, a graduate student who is working on his Ph.D. with the American
Museum of Natural History in New York. "No one had reported this object
before, and it was very close to Alcor, so we realized it was probably an
unknown companion star."

A few months later, the team looked at the star again, hoping to prove that
the two stars were companions by mapping the tiny movement of both in
relation to very distant background stars as the Earth moves around the
Sun, or parallactic motion. If the proposed companion were just a
background star, it wouldn't move along with Alcor.

"We went back 103 days later and found the companion had the same motion as
Alcor," said Ben R. Oppenheimer, Curator and Professor in the Department of
Astrophysics at AMNH.

Alcor and its newly found, smaller companion, Alcor B, are both about 80
light-years away from Earth and orbit each other every 90 years or more.

Color and size

The team was also able to determine the color, brightness and even rough
composition of Alcor B because the novel method of observation they use
records images at many different colors simultaneously. The team determined
that Alcor B is a common type of M-dwarf star or red dwarf that is about
250 times the mass of Jupiter, or roughly a quarter of the mass of our Sun.
The companion is much smaller and cooler than Alcor A.

"Red dwarfs are not commonly reported around the brighter higher mass type
of star that Alcor is, but we have a hunch that they are actually fairly
common," Oppenheimer said. "This discovery shows that even the brightest
and most familiar stars in the sky hold secrets we have yet to reveal."

The new observations are detailed in the Astrophysical Journal.

Oppenheimer and his team hope to use the same technique of looking for
parallactic motion in the search for exoplanets.

"We hope to use the same technique to check that other objects we find like
exoplanets are truly bound their host stars," Zimmerman said. "In fact, we
anticipate other research groups hunting for exoplanets will also use this
technique to speed up the discovery process."

GSWeb8 wrote:

I saw an article in USA Today yesterday about a new type of star
discovered...not massive enough to become a black hole, and more
massive than the sun; the artical referrenced quark material, but the
find was not a quark star. Any comments or links to this?

ahhhh, errrr, well ... check with Kitty Bones at Central
Alcoholic Astronomers. They must censure and stamp all astro news before
anyone on the planet can get it -
your news story is probably being held not stamped
yet due to Kimp Feegur's sudden tragic loss of his best
friend on earth, long time family member, soul mate, etal -
telescope maker John Gregory. Feegur posted at length
his sentimentalities and expressions on CAA's website.
As soon as Feegur is done greiving in his deep personal
loss then the world will get back to order, including
Mediacom lost email -

"I dont have time for analysis - am just passing this on"
(as if I could do analysis!)

good luck!