Latest / Star Trails: From Backyard Astronomy to Cosmic Wonder
The Quiet Majority of Stars
This week we take a nerdy detour into the lives of stars by building a tiny simulated galaxy in Python. We form half a million stars, roll the clock forward 10 billion years, and discover something counterintuitive: nearly all of them are still shining. The stars that dominate our constellations, the bright, showy ones, are statistically the least likely to survive. The night sky, it turns out, is a biased sample.From there, we leave the realm of statistics and tour a handful of “highlight reel” stars: neighbors like Proxima Centauri and Barnard’s Star, navigational royalty like Canopus…
The skinny
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