I'm a science journalist and host of Cosmic Controversy (brucedorminey.podbean.com) as well as author of 'Distant Wanderers: the Search for Planets Beyond the Solar System.' I primarily cover aerospace and astronomy.
First detected more than four centuries ago, highly evolved stars known as Mira variables have long been observationally neglected by most of the professional astronomical community. That’s even though they are hunted by scores of amateur astronomers who continue to first find them and record their variable brightnesses.
We have this archival data set that was collected roughly between 1998 and 2008 on the Palomar Testbed Interferometer in California, van Belle, the paper’s lead author and Director of Science at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz., told me via phone. I also have a small telescope here on Mars Hill, where we've recently been observing these Mira variables, he says.They're losing about a millionth the mass of the sun every single year, says van Belle.
As the progenitor of this whole class of Mira stars, Omicron Ceti has been actually observed by astronomers for the past 400 years, says van Belle. That’s much longer than most things that we've studied in astronomy, and that gives us a bit of a window into how these things behave over long periods of time, he says.The exact pulsation mechanism is still an open question, although explanations include the so-called Kappa opacity mechanism.
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