#red giant

[black-arcana]

Iapetus ➢ Red Giant (feat. Fabienne Erni)

[whirligig-girl]

Digital painting of the red giant star Betelgeuse and its newly discovered companion Siwarha. Simulations suggest giant stars have a small number of enormous convection cells rather than a huge amount of continent-sized convection cells as on the Sun, and that their photospheres are not a hard boundary but rather smoothly deform into a corona.

Betelgeuse is 640 times the size of the Sun (or 2.98 au radius). It is 65,000 times more luminous than the Sun. But as opposed to the Sun's 5800 K surface temperature, Betelgeuse is only 3800 Kelvins, leading to an almost candle-like yellow-orange glow.

Siwarha is depicted here as a K-dwarf, 2/3rds the mass of the Sun. It is thought to be responsible for a 6-year-long periodic change in Betelgeuse's apparent brightness--It casts a wake behind it as it travels through Betelgeuse's nebulous and dusty corona.

[whirligig-girl]

There is a class of stars called Eclipsing Binary stars, where a star can go in front of another star periodically and block out a portion of its light. The most famous of these is Algol in Perseus.

Recently a Triple eclipsing binary has been discovered, TIC 29574134. Two close together sun-like stars are orbited by a red giant star such that, when the red giant star goes behind the sunlike stars, the sunlike stars block some of the red giant's light, in steps.

You can read the paper on the ArXiv here:

[thebeastsofindia]

Red Giant (Indrella ampulla), family Ariophantidae, order Stylommatophora, Karnataka, India

Photo by Tarun Menon

[scitechchron]

SciTech Chronicles. . . . . . . . .March 12th, 2026

SciTech Chronicles. . . . . . . . .March 12th, 2026

Vol V Issue 58 Who Said this? It's easier to fool people than to convince them they have been fooled. Today, 489 links Curated Today's Five

[phaesyle-sarmatia]

Imagine you're an individual of a sapient species and civilization on an Earthlike planet in the habitable zone of a G type main sequence star like Sol. Life on your planet has gone through a 4 to 5 billion year history similar in complexity to Earth's biosphere.

About five million years ago, your planet's star was captured by a massive red giant, settling into a stable orbit at a distance not prohibitive to the perseverence of life. It raised the planet's temperature a few degrees and caused a moderate mass extinction, which is part of what caused the speciation event that led to the development of your own species. Your scientists figured out how all of this happened within the last few centuries in the same way that human scientists puzzled out the history of the Earth. The twin suns, one white and the other cherry red, have been the only sky you've ever known, and your world's cultures have a rich history of myth regarding the suns.

It turns out, though, that the red giant was at the very end of the asymptotic phase, and in the last few years your astronomers and astrophysicists have begun to note with increasing alarm that the giant is about to explode and may do so at any time, ending all life on your planet. A creeping terror begins to spread across the world as the dire predictions are published by increasingly reputable sources. Scientists appear on television and somberly inform the public that their fear is unfortunately justified, and the entire world is sitting next to time bomb ticking away its final seconds.

There's no way to sugarcoat it, and they tell it to the public as it is. There's an eerie calm. Science fiction stories often imagined that such information would result in mass panic, but that's not exactly what's happening. There is a slowly increasing frequency of cult formation. There are sporadic riots against unjust systems. A few governments attempt to desperately hide the information and deny it. Religious people are split between fatalism and denial. War actually decreases in frequency, since the knowledge of the imminent end of the world makes it all seem so pointless. Economic systems begin to change.

Universal incomes are instituted. Wealthy property owners begin to donate their wealth. Parties work together. There are a few civil wars between denialists and fatalists, but the world doesn't end with nuclear fire at your species' hands. Mostly, everyone just kind of accepts it and begins to live for kindness and learning in these final days, unsure whether they have a few centuries or don't have tomorrow.

Then, on a fine, beautiful day, with all the plants blooming with spores and the animals chittering happily, the end comes. Lights can be seen bursting from the surface of the little sun. Its stellar surface starts to bow and distort. Waves of gas can be observed emerging from it.

Here and there, sirens wail and task forces scramble. Some people launch rockets to escape in well-stocked space habitats. One country even launches a generation ship that had been proposed for years and constructed in space. They aim it in the direction of a distant star with eight planets, three of which might even be habitable, that had been discovered a few years prior with the extra funding to astronomy that governments had started to allocate.

Some people laugh. Some people cry. Some don't even care. People rush to see loved ones. They sing hymns and they raise their hands to the sky that had been so merciful until now, either in joy or desperate pleading to old neglected gods, hoping against hope for a final salvation. Some people go to temple. Others go to parties. They gather on rooftops to watch it all happen with special glasses given away for free by a cosmetics company.

Then, a blinding flash. A flood of color. Wild tendrils of fuchsia and green, yellow and red and blue, shoot out and curl all around the world. Then, you feel the heat, steadily rising as the UV-C hits you, the x-rays following soon after. The last thing you see is the clouds swept away. Light consumes everything. Then, nothing at all.

A hundred thousand years later, an unknown interstellar object enters the vicinity of Sol. It's traveling slow enough to be captured by the sun, and humanity detects it, giving it the designation 4I/2027 Narada. Soon, the Indian space agency authorizes a mission in collaboration with China to investigate. Called Kālidāsa, space programs watch with bated breath as it nears the 4I in 2034, eager for the chance to get a good look at an interstellar object for the first time.

It is only when the probe is about 50,000 km away that we get the first clear pictures, and silence startles the Earth like thunder in a cave. It is the derelict hulk of an ancient spacecraft, bleached white by stellar winds. The Kālidāsa was built with a small rover, the Jīnxīng, that was designed to gather samples and explore it. The object plainly experienced an impact at some point, as a gaping hole is present exposing the inner structure.

Jīnxīng is released, touching down on the ragged edge of a broken floor. It's a living compartment. We see beds in which once slept an ancient people. We see the remains of belongings with strange writing.

Whatever air was in it leaked out long ago. Going deeper into the object, we finally see an inner room, where small piles of white bones lie carefully arranged in rows, with small metal markers over them inscribed with the strange writing. It is at this point that we find a small box fashioned of an alloy resistant to corrosion over millions of years. Lying next to it, a chaotic pile of bones with no marker over them. The rover is able to retrieve the box, and launches it with its sample return probe back to Earth.

Within the box is a small object, simple and lacking in writing. It only has a single button on its surface. After about a year of deliberation over potential dangers, we decide to press the button. This causes the object to power on, casting a display with audio. The equipment must have survived in the safety of its protective box.

We see their triangular faces. Five eyes, black with red irises. A vertical jawless mouth. A blowhole on the crown of the head. Six four-jointed limbs emerge from their backs with suckers on the end. Four tube-feet emerge from the torso. Skin in various shades of blue-green to yellow-brown. We see them waving at us, swinging their limbs to and fro in a gesture we instinctively know is greeting.

Images flash by accompanied by audio. We hear them singing with their blowholes, bird-like tones in microtonal harmonies. We see them playing instruments and playing games with balls and sticks. We see their buildings, low-lying and sprawling like a vision of Le Corbusier, by rivers and mountains, deserts and thick jungles. Fields of black and red grasses and forests of barrel-like plants with fanning red to yellow leaves emerging from the top. We see scientific anatomical diagrams of their bodies. We see them writing with brushes and typing with strange circular keyboards.

Then, we see them trembling, but the music never stops. We see pictures of two suns in the sky, one undergoing supernova. We see the space habitat when it was spinning and inhabited, full of families huddled together. We hear them singing. We see their graves. We see one last face, wrinkled and sagging. They place a single sucker-hand on their belly, then on the screen of the camera before putting it down and turning it off; a final embrace from one five-ringed heart to another with four chambers. Then, the recording repeats.

[livequrious]

Ghost in the Ring: A Mysterious Iron Bar Hints at a Lost Planet's Fate

For centuries, humanity has gazed up at the constellation of Lyra and found a celestial smoke ring, a ghostly halo of cosmic dust and gas known as the Ring Nebula. It is one of the most famous and photographed objects in the night sky, a beautiful and serene testament to the final act of a dying star. But recent observations have shattered this peaceful image, revealing a secret hidden within its…

Ghost in the Ring: A Mysterious Iron Bar Hints at a Lost Planet's Fate

[linziyw4l8]

▪ MARS ▪

Yeah, it's been a while since I've been around... But in that time, I've managed to come up with and do a lot! I decided to create my own AU - "Red Giant."

So, in this AU - as you probably know, in billions of years, the sun will become red and big. (Much bigger than it was.)

I decided to start with Mars (I don't know why, I just guess).

So, why not?

I got all the information about the "Red Giant" from the Internet, and also about what can happen to planets, lol :D...