I love living in the future.

[theweaselking]

Epsilon Aurigae: An eclipsing binary star. Every 27 years, a cold disk-shaped object more than 4 AU across passes in front of the star.



Let's repeat that: an opaque, cold disk, 30 light-minutes across, is orbiting a star, and *we can see it*.

(For bonus points: The disk has a hole in the middle *that contains another star*, they're pretty sure - the hole hasn't crossed the star yet in the current eclipse, so they're working off of observations from the mid-1980s until the current eclipse progresses a little further.)

Comments

[spondee.livejournal.com]

Thank you for that. It may be the coolest thing I've ever seen.

[sola.livejournal.com]

Dear universe:

Please keep being amazing.

[skiriki.livejournal.com]

Awesome!

[eyemage.livejournal.com]

is it wrong i want that megastructure to be artificially made?

[kierthos.livejournal.com]

IT IS GALACTUS

[aeduna.livejournal.com]

"ringworld" was the first thing that went through my mind, yeah :) Been rereading a lot of Niven recently tho

[krfsm.livejournal.com]

More like Alderson Disk.

[pappy-legba.livejournal.com]

Quibble: 30 light-minutes is pretty damned big-- Jupiter is around .008 light-minutes wide. We can detect objects considerably smaller than that.

Being able to casually blow off the observation of stellar occlusions from light years away is another sign of living in the future.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

We can detect smaller objects, but we can *see* this one.

This is awesome!

[holyoutlaw.livejournal.com]

Meet mckitterick: http://mckitterick.livejournal.com/623464.html

[mckitterick.livejournal.com]

It's an awesome universe we live in!

[http://users.livejournal.com/_jeremiad/]

What does this mean?

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

That the universe is a strange and awesome place, basically.

(The object is a dust cloud, the kind I'd think you'd find around a newly forming star system. But it's SO COOL that we can SEE IT THIS WAY.)

[theamaranth.livejournal.com]

I may not understand the details, but if the scientists are getting schoolgirl-excited over it, I automatically get the vapors.