Memories of Connor's Adventures

Orlando the Adventurer pulled a Scimitar from beneath his Robes and smiled...

Monday, 29 April 2019

Bad Astronomy: That Wagonwheel beyond Proxima Centauri



So what can we see with our wagon wheel? The best I can say is the small object in orbit is something close to Rubidium by its colour. Rubidium is apparently common in cores of stars that have swelled to form Red Giants. So at some point our Red Giant got eaten by its companion leaving a Rubidium Core. Given the short lived decay time on most Rubidium this is Rubidium-87.

Now it amounts to a y class dwarf orbiting a White Dwarf.


The Ring and spokes are formed as gravitational harmonics. Where the mass is low (the harmonic nodes) the mass of the central star is sufficient to pull ring material into the star. Eventually these harmonics should separate out into globular clusters and form planets Orbiting the central star.
What will happen to the Rubidium core? With a 4.9 x 10^10 year decay rate we can expect it to persist for three times the current age of the Universe.
Even if it becomes building material in the solar system, as opposed to pulled into that feeder star.

I suppose Life in that solar system got wiped out by the red giant...

Update: identifying our binary star (4 May, 2019)

 Star                          LP145-141, 2MASS J11454297-6450297 
 Description                                White Dwarf                           
 Right Ascension                        11h 45m 42.9205s
 Declination                                 -64° 50' 29.459"                      
 Distance                                     15.11 LY                                    

The Hubble undertook a survey and found LP145-141 to be a White dwarf with no apparent partners, but having spotted this stellar by lensing over the edge of Proxima Centauri the y class companion may have been otherwise non-visible. We know it is behind and below Proxima (at a greater declination than -62° 40' 46.1631"), and left of Proxima (less than the right ascension of 14h 29m 42.94853s). And its a white dwarf (fourth from our star beyond Sirius b, Procyon b, Van Maanen's Star).

Update (5th october 2019):
Roche limit is the orbital radius of that ring on the wagon wheel.

{\displaystyle d=R_{M}\left(2{\frac {\rho _{M}}{\rho _{m}}}\right)^{\frac {1}{3}}}Where R_M is the radius of the primary, \rho_M is the density of the primary, and \rho_mis the density of the satellite.
White dwarf density: 1 x 109 kg/m
Thats like 1,000,000 g/cubic centimetre

Assuming the ring is iron from a stellar core inside the roche limit of the white dwarf, Stellar core collapse being at 1010 g/cc.

Then d= 0.0271539677 × 0.01Rs = 0.0002715397 RSolar

So... the radius for the ring around the white dwarf made of iron core material from a star is 188.91016929 km. 

It seems a tad close for the apparent distance from the white dwarf but not necessarily the distance from the ring to the orbiting rubidium core acting on it.

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