Think twice before gifting someone an M dwarf this holiday season

Comments

• Greg@lemmy.ca ⁨19⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago

  I want more of these present memes please 🙏

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• SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Easier to care for than a succulent, tho.

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  • FordBeeblebrox@lemmy.world ⁨43⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago

    For me it’s cilantro indoors. Can’t get it to stay alive more than a couple weeks, I don’t think I’m ready to take care of a whole star.

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  • Kolanaki@yiffit.net ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    forgets to feed M dwarf star for a day; star collapses into a blackhole

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    • eager_eagle@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      and just like that you now have a 10^100 year commitment

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• ivanafterall@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I love my two M dwarfs and wouldn’t trade them for the world, but they require a lot of energy and have tons to burn.

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• raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  *billion

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  • peoplebeproblems@midwest.social ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    The other two have corrected you on the lifespan of red dwars.

    However, it’s actually pretty neat to understand why small stars have exceptionally long lifespans, and big ones are very short: it’s because of the limitations of quantum tunneling and nuclear fusion, vs mass.

    In order for a star to generate any light, it needs a shit ton of energy. The only way to get this epic shit ton of energy is nuclear fusion. Because of physics, massive particles are attracted to eachother because of gravity. Heavier masses attract more particles. As the particles start piling up on top of eachother, they generate heat because they are also being repelled by other forces (namely electromagnetism). Heat is really a particles kinetic energy - the amount of energy of its movement.

    At a certain point, hydrogen fuses to Helium, helium fuses, then heavier elements like carbon, oxygen and nitrogen, all the way up to Iron.

    Each time a specific fuel runs out, there is a small to large explosion as the force compressing the particles is less than the force repelling the particles. Depending on how massive the star is, this could happen very quickly, or not at all. Red dwarfs don’t usually have the mass required to fuse more helium, so the fusion reaction continues forever until the gravitational forces are in equilibrium with the e&m forces. In bigger stars, the rate of fuel being consumed increases with mass, so you burn through each fuel quicker. In a star hypothetically large enough, it’s possible that the mass is enormous enough for it to consume all of its fuel in short succession, and instead of even getting a black hole, the star completely blows itself apart.

    Which leads to other really crazy things - like the question on supermassive black holes in the center of galaxies. How did they form if stars of a certain size would blow themselves to smitherings?

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    • raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      The other two have corrected you on the lifespan of red dwarfs.

      *They corrected me on which star the meme was about.

      Either way, thanks for the mention of a theory of a second, “dark” big bang - that was an interesting web research just now.

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    • SparrowHawk@feddit.it ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Couldn’t it be that the center of newlyborn galaxies are massive enough that many black holes form and then the black holes merge together, creating one supermassive black hole?

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  • eager_eagle@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    that’s not the sun

    Recent astrophysical models suggest that red dwarfs of 0.1 M☉ may stay on the main sequence for some six to twelve trillion years, […]

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    • raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      that’s not the sun

      Yeah I missed that reference, as it is an artist’s impression it didn’t occur to me this could be any other star since the last format of this meme that I saw was still using something on the planet Earth as subject of the joke.

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  • HakFoo@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I though dwarf stars had far longer lifespans than solar-type stars, and conversely the largest giants last only tens of millions of years.

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    • raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      see above - missed that it wasn’t supposed to be our sun.

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    • peoplebeproblems@midwest.social ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      You are correct. I don’t know what evidence we have of super sized stars, but beyond a certainly limit, stars can burn through their fuel faster than it can condense.

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