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The Final Catastrophe
The End of the Kali Yuga
Alcyone and Negative Emotions
When and How Will the Apocalypse Arrive?
If Tyche exists at that distance, its orbital period is likely more like tens of thousands of years. As a point of reference, I dug up the orbital period and distance for Sedna (en.wikipedia.org...) and its orbital period is about 12000 years, and about 518 AU from the sun. (its orbit is highly eccentric, so this varies a lot)
Originally posted by galadofwarthethird
So since i have not read this entire thread yet, whats the consensus? Did they find Binky/Nibiru/Tyche/whatever out there in lonely ol space, or we still debating the possibilities that something can be out there? Does anybody really know anything, or it's just all theories?
Astronomers have found a mysterious young star which is travelling inbound towards the Milky Way at an unusual speed of about 1.6 million miles per hour, or 2.6 million kilometers per hour. The discoverers of star HE 0437-5439, thought at first that the wavelength calibration of their instruments was off, but after confirming the star's spectral information with the European Southern Observatory's telescope in Chile, they discovered that the star seems to have been slingshot probably from the Large Magellanic Cloud, an irregular galaxy that is near but outside the Milky Way and is visible in the southern hemisphere.
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dsc.discovery.com
It's more likely that the star is from the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) a irregular galaxy very near, but outside the Milky Way and visible in the night skies of Earth's Southern Hemisphere. But the LMC poses another problem, said Kormendy.
"Almost certainly the LMC does not have a supermassive black hole to do the same job," said Kormendy.
That means something even more unusual might have thrown the star towards the Milky Way, something like a sideways blast by a much bigger companion star that exploded as a supernova, he said.
Using ESO's Very Large Telescope, astronomers [1] have recorded a massive star moving at more than 2.6 million kilometres per hour. Stars are not born with such large velocities. Its position in the sky leads to the suggestion that the star was kicked out from the Large Magellanic Cloud, providing indirect evidence for a massive black hole in the Milky Way's closest neighbour. These results will soon be published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters [2].
"At such a speed, the star would go around the Earth in less than a minute!", says Uli Heber, one of the scientists at the Dr. Remeis-Sternwarte (University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany) and the Centre for Astrophysics Research (University of Hertfordshire, UK) who conducted the study.
The hot massive star was discovered in the framework of the Hamburg/ESO sky survey far out in the halo of the Milky Way, towards the Doradus Constellation ("the Swordfish").
"This is a rather unusual place for such a star: massive stars are ordinarily found in the disc of the Milky Way", explains Ralf Napiwotzki, another member of the team. "Our data obtained with the UVES instrument on the Very Large Telescope, at Paranal (Chile), confirm the star to be rather young and to have a chemical composition similar to our Sun."
The data also revealed the high speed of the star, solving the riddle of its present location: the star did not form in the Milky Way halo, but happens to be there while on its interstellar - or intergalactic - travel.
"But when we calculated how long it would take for the star to travel from the centre of our Galaxy to its present location, we found this to be more than three times its age", says Heber. "Either the star is older than it appears or it was born and accelerated elsewhere", he adds.
As a matter of fact, HE0457-5439 - as the star is called - lies closer to one of the Milky Way satellite galaxies, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), located 160,000 light-years away from us. The astronomers find it likely for the star to have reached its present position had it been ejected from the centre of the LMC. This could suggest the existence of a massive black hole inside the LMC, in order to have imparted the speeding star the necessary kick.
Another explanation would require the star to be the result of the merging of two stars. In this case, the star could be older that presently thought, giving it time to have travelled all the way from the Milky Way Centre. This scenario, however, requires quite some fine-tuning. The astronomers are now planning new observations to confirm one of the two scenarios.
Originally posted by nataylor
That star, HE0437-5439, is 200,000 light years away from us. And it's moving away from us at 723 km/s.
Originally posted by MrCrindleton
2012 ITS COMING SO PREPARE YOUR SHELTERS YOU WILL NOT GET ANOTHER WARNING POUNDLAND ARE SELLING EMERGENCY TENS FOR THIS EXACT SITUATION