PV Gap

Sherri Said:

astronomy...solar system...stars...??

We Answered:

1. Yellow: Sun, Capella

Blue: 10 Lacerta, Sirius

Red: Betelgeuse, Antares

2. When a star dies and collapses into its own gravity until a point of singularity (infinite gravity) is formed.

3. Location. Nothing else, I think.

4. Olympus Mons (Mars), Tohil Mons(Io, Saturn),and some probables for the third:

a. Mount Everest
b. Family Mountain- On the Moon
c. Mount Hadley- On the Moon

5. Because it's too small. It's now a dwarf planet.

Jorge Said:

Question about the star that exploded to form our solar system.?

We Answered:

It probably might be about the mass of any of the bright stars in Orion. Typically, anywhere from type O stars to type A stars (as they were when on the main sequence) are expected to go supernova.

That is why you hear a lot of hype about Betelgeuse going supernova (granted, Betelgeuse is an M-type star now, but in its past it was probably a type A star when it was on the main sequence).


The general fate of most stars is to move away from being main sequence stars to being red giants. This happened to Betelgeuse, and it WILL happen to our sun in about 5 billion years.

Our sun will not go supernova like Betelgeuse will though. Our sun simply doesn't have enough mass. Betelgeuse however, does.

Probably the ancient star that supernovaed to become our sun, ALSO became numerous stars in our stellar neighborhood. Probably the numerous red dwarfs nearby, and probably the Alpha Centauri system, and probably also Sirius, and maybe even as distant as Epsilon Eridani.

If you add up some of the major stars in the stellar neighborhood, you might get about 8 solar masses worth of material that probably originated from the supernova. So, maybe a 10 solar mass star went supernova, and the steller neighborhood of the sun is simply the remnants of that star.


I do doubt it that such a star would've had life, as these large blue stars aren't really where we look for life, because their habitable zone would make for incredibly long year lengths. Plus, blue stars emit a lot more dangerous radiation (UV radiation and even a bunch of X-rays) than sun-like stars or red dwarfs.


If there was any life from the previous generation star system, I doubt any of it remained to form us, since these supernova expansions are very chaotic and can barely preserve any chemical compounds, let alone complicated compounds like those you hope.

The supernova expansions are actually what produce all elements of greater atomic number than iron. Many whole atoms don't even "survive" the supernova.

Marlene Said:

What happens to kepler`s laws if I want to create a virtual multi-star solar system?

We Answered:

You should look up the 'n-body problem'. It requires numerical integration techniques, preferably with an adaptive timestep algorithm. Unless you want lousy accuracy or inefficient computation, I recommend the 4th-order Runge-Kutta integration method. It's the best blend of simplicity of coding, and efficiency of execution. But it does take some study to get it right.

Kepler's laws only apply to a situation where one body orbits another, much more massive body. If there are three bodies, or two bodies with similar masses, Kepler's laws are meaningless.