Zeta Retciculi - Photo and Discussion

Thanks, Stormbringer, for sharing that. Trying to overcome the hydrostatic equilibrium of a star with conventional ideas about mixing materials sounds like the most difficult way of going about stellar engineering. If we ever manage to get a space warping device to work, it might be useful for stellar engineering, as well as interstellar travel.
Imagine a space vessel with a field of contracted space in front of it, flying in through the outer layers of the Sun, and grazing the core. Fresh hydrogen would presumably be pulled into the core along with the ship. It could make repeated passes thru the Sun to deliver more and more hydrogen.
If we have learned how to make a device that can confine a hydrogen fusion reaction on Earth, this would probably provide useful lessons about how to build a space vessel that can withstand passage thru the Sun.
The article and video discuss rejuvenating a star that has apparently ceased hydrogen fusion. It would seem to make more sense to start the rejuvenation process much earlier, before the star expanded enough to harm its inhabited planets. This would be while it is still on the main sequence. Our Sun will apparently expand in this way in 500 million to 1 billion years, even tho it still has several billion more years of hydrogen fusion ahead of it.
Stellar engineering to bring fresh hydrogen into the core of a star would apparently have the effect of reducing the intensity of the the fusion process, and so the luminosity of the star. The star would appear anomalously dim for its age, as determined by other methods. This is just what we seem to find in the stars Zeta 1 and Zeta 2 Reticuli.

Ross 54
Thanks, Stormbringer, for sharing that. Trying to overcome the hydrostatic equilibrium of a star with conventional ideas about mixing materials sounds like the most difficult way of going about stellar engineering. If we ever manage to get a space warping device to work, it might be useful for stellar engineering, as well as interstellar travel.
Imagine a space vessel with a field of contracted space in front of it, flying in through the outer layers of the Sun, and grazing the core. Fresh hydrogen would presumably be pulled into the core along with the ship. It could make repeated passes thru the Sun to deliver more and more hydrogen.
If we have learned how to make a device that can confine a hydrogen fusion reaction on Earth, this would probably provide useful lessons about how to build a space vessel that can withstand passage thru the Sun.
The article and video discuss rejuvenating a star that has apparently ceased hydrogen fusion. It would seem to make more sense to start the rejuvenation process much earlier, before the star expanded enough to harm its inhabited planets. This would be while it is still on the main sequence. Our Sun will apparently expand in this way in 500 million to 1 billion years, even tho it still has several billion more years of hydrogen fusion ahead of it.
Stellar engineering to bring fresh hydrogen into the core of a star would apparently have the effect of reducing the intensity of the the fusion process, and so the luminosity of the star. The star would appear anomalously dim for its age, as determined by other methods. This is just what we seem to find in the stars Zeta 1 and Zeta 2 Reticuli.

monopole matter or perhaps other pseudo baryonic matter would be strong enough to withstand not only the temperatures within the sun but also the pressure and other forces. this is because the pseudo protons and pseudo neutrons are closer together than regular protons and neutrons. the strong force tubes are shorter. the bonding force is therefore larger than in regular matter. and the pseudo electrons orbit closer to the pseudo nucleus resulting in increased boding strength at the electron valence shell level. the over all effect is that monopole matter is millions of times tougher to break bonds on than regular matter.

but i bet the easiest way to pump hydrogen into the core would be with wormholes. and quantum back pressure could be used to make a hell of a pump. negative energy on the sucking end, submerge it into the layers with hydrogen and anything trying to rise above it would get sucked in. because that's what negative energy does. you try to move away you move towards it instead.
getting the worm hole is the hard part after that you can actually produce negative energy by tossing regular energy in one end of it. no need to muck about with squeezed light or casimir plates and crude stuff like that.

' The Zeta Reticuli system is a fascinating place where I'd expect to find advanced life...the stars are estimated to be 3 billion years older than our Sun'. -- Ray Villard, science writer, and public information manager of the Space Telescope Science Institute, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore Maryland.

Besides the already discussed age discrepancy for the Zeta Reticuli stars-- 1.5 to 3 billion years, by spectroscopic methods, and 6 to 8 billion by observing their motions, there seems to be some disagreement about the figures within the younger age range.

The webpage, linked below, seems to give access to a good deal of detailed scientific information on the ZR system. On it we see the following: age of Zeta 2 Reticuli-- 3 billion years, age of Zeta 1 -- 200 million years.
It hardly seems likely that two stars which have obviously been linked to one another throughout time, and are of the same stellar type would have ages differing by 2 billion, 800 million years. That difference is better than one quarter the expected main sequence lifetime of such stars.
I will be looking further into the source of these figures, and what their discrepancy might be able to tell us. I will report back here with the results.
BTW -- Jadestar, if you are reading along here, please check your private messages. Thank you.

www.astrostudio.org...

Great thread S&F!

I'd like to add that maybe a binary star system might encourage space flight a lot differently compared to our star system.

If we had a more exotic and intriguing solar system do you think we would be more inclined to explore?

game over man
Great thread S&F!

I'd like to add that maybe a binary star system might encourage space flight a lot differently compared to our star system.

If we had a more exotic and intriguing solar system do you think we would be more inclined to explore?

Thanks for those kind words.
Yes, the two stars are far enough apart that each might have its own set of planets. If life existed on planets of each star it could be readily detected by the other. This would very likely be an incentive to explore these planets.
The distance is substantial, but far less than the usual distance between stars. Imagine what we would do, if we had solid evidence of life, and perhaps another civilization in space, only 1/12 or so of a light year distant!

Erik Anderson of Astrostudio.com has kindly replied to my inquiry. He reports that the figure on his website for the age of Zeta 1 Reticili was gotten from The Geneva-Copenhagen Survey of the Solar Neighbourhood, due to J. Holmburg, et al.

Unfortunately the age range is 200 million to 7 billion years; that for Zeta 2 Reticuli is 3 to 7 billion years. Very little can be determined from these wide ranges of ages. They do, at least reflect the odd ambiguity about the ages of these stars.

I found another paper bearing on the stars Zeta 1 & 2 Reticuli. A link to it will be found, below. I will briefly summarize a few of the main points, germane to the discussion on this thread.
The authors confirm that the ZR stars are part of a stellar moving group. They put the average age of the stars in this group at about 5 billion years. It's believed that all the stars in a moving group should be of about the same age, as they formed together at about the same time.
They examine the chromospheric activity of the stars, and infer from this that the age of Zeta 1 Reticuli is 1 to 3.3 billion years and that of zeta 2 is 3.5 to 12.1 billion years. The supposed age figures for the two stars do not overlap at all. In order for their ages to even come close to one another, they would have to fall at the very top and the very bottom of their age ranges, respectively. The authors rightly call this a marginal possibility.
Again we see that the ages of the ZR stars present an odd, contradictory picture. The figures based on the activity intrinsic to the stars now seem to contradict each other, as well as the ages derived from various observations of their motions in space.
adsabs.harvard.edu...

Interesting too, that the latest paper I cited above also contains the observation that the very light element lithium was depleted in the Zeta Reticuli stars, relative to our Sun. It's thought that lithium is gradually depleted as a star ages. This implies that the ZR stars could be older than the Sun.
As far as I know, this is the first instance of an internal factor of the ZR stars supporting the older age indications given by their various motions.

It's peculiar how the abundance of calcium in the spectra of the two ZR stars differs so much. Calcium is considered one of the prime indicators of stellar age. Zeta 2 Reticuli is markedly deficient in calcium, and so appears older than the Sun. Zeta 1 is enhanced in the same element, and so, is thought to be much younger.
This is not at all likely to be the case, as the authors of the last cited paper agree. the two stars are thought to be of nearly the same age, on other, very sound scientific evidence. Some unexplained difference in the chromospheric evolution of the two stars is assumed to exist.
I see no reason to exclude the possibility that this difference is due to stellar rejuvenation engineering. If outer layers of hydrogen were mixed back into the cores of the stars, some calcium may have gone along for the ride, depleting that element in the chromosphere.

Perhaps the technique was refined between the time of its application to the first star and then the second. It would presumably be inefficient to transport calcium along with hydrogen, when it is not needed. If relatively pure hydrogen-rich stellar material was sent into the core of the star, the ratio of calcium in the outer layers would, inevitably, go up.
The order in which the stars would have been rejuvenated in this scenario even makes sense. First Zeta 2, which is a bit more massive, and so would evolve into a hotter star sooner than the other, and then Zeta 1, in slightly less urgent need of attention.

Awesome astrophotography JadeStar. Where can one get the Planetary Habitability Simulator from? That looks like a fun piece of kit to have on hand.

1ofthe9
Awesome astrophotography JadeStar.

Where can one get the Planetary Habitability Simulator from? That looks like a fun piece of kit to have on hand.

JadeStar hasn't been heard from on ATS, or visited this website for the past 2 & 1/2 weeks, nor did she respond to my PM. She had given a link to the Planetary Habitability Simulator at the University of Washington. It is:
depts.washington.edu...

Probably the best post I have ever seen on this forum.

Yes, JadeStar did ATS a real service, with this, and other threads she made. She has access to lots of interesting information. I hope she sees fit to return to this website at some point; she is missed here.
I'd like to have a discussion with her about the technological singularity, about which, judging by her passing remarks on this topic, we have some interesting differences of opinion, as we do in several areas of astrobiology and UFOlogy.

Zeta 2 Reticuli apparently has a debris disk approximately 100 AU out. There are suspected gas giant planets at about 60 and/or 200 AU. Either or both might serve to deflect asteroid-like debris away from any smaller, inner planets, as Jupiter is thought to do for Earth.

Since Zeta 2 Reticuli is similar to the Sun, a planet in its habitable zone would also be at approximately 1 AU. The distance from from the debris disk in the Z2R system to a habitable planet is much greater than the distance from Earth to the asteroid belt.
This means that in the Z2R system, it would be easier to deflect objects away from a habitable planet. Smaller initial deflections would cause greater changes in course, by the time a potential impactor had crossed the intervening distance.

It's too bad NASA cancelled the Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF) due to funding. I've been looking for recent news on Zeta Reticuli, but can't find any. Anyone have any updates?

Jade you made my day....
Your posts and topics are
probly the only ones i read
in full...
S+F

oh i havent even skimmed the
replies yet

originally posted by: Miccey
Jade you made my day....
Your posts and topics are
probly the only ones i read
in full...
S+F

oh i havent even skimmed the
replies yet

Thanks.

originally posted by: game over man
It's too bad NASA cancelled the Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF) due to funding. I've been looking for recent news on Zeta Reticuli, but can't find any. Anyone have any updates?

There is good news on the planet search front. I can confirm that NASA's TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) will target both of the Zeta Reticuli stars in 2017.

I have also heard that the similar European Space Agency's mission called PLATO will as well.

Additionally there are several ground observing campaigns looking for planets around the Zeta Reticuli stars and this will get a HUGE boost when the two massive telescopes in Hawaii (Thirty Meter Telescope) and in Chile (European Extremely Large Telescope) are completed in the early 2020s.

it's tangential; but i think i remember an article concerning a revision to the theories that determine the ages of stars and that the revised model accounts for the anomalies in several stars behavior vs ages? that would pertain To Ross's information about zeta reticuli being unusual? i forget the details but i think it concerned stellar chemistry or motion; maybe both.