T Tauri Is No T Tauri
- Thread starter Chaodiurn
- Start date
It's a G-type with an identity crisis.
It rather seems like an instant star to me, and someone added too much water.
G Tauri!
S
If space is personified as a woman and I just reached the G... no, nevermind.
The star T Tauri is not a T Tauri class star? That seems odd.
Also (from Wikipedia): "The T Tauri system consists of at least three stars [...]"
I only see two stars in the screenshot.
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Sorry if missed sarcasm. The shown star is the T Tauri star, as in the one pre-main-sequence-star after which all the other pre-main-sequence T Tauri stars are named (the ones we cannot scoop from). The clue is that THE T Tauri is no T Tauri but an ordinary, very scoopable main-sequence spectral G star. So, it's no yellow T Tauri, despite being THE T Tauri (see Hagledesperado's link for further informations), but it should.
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But there are two gas giants! Gas giant, brown dwarf... y'know... With very dirty windscreens that's solvable.
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Ah got it. I missed the star name in the first pic. But why no picture of actual scooping? Yes the T Tauri is a G type star in any case, whether or not it is a "class T". Every yellow T Tauri stars is also a Gs and Fs as well. The letter designation is nothing to do with their internal structure, but has to do with the color/temperature of the (proto)star. My guess is that whoever coded the T Tauri star was going off of some star chart data and it feed "G" into the spectral data, so the stellar forge kicked out an extremely young main sequence G star. Meanwhile all the other T Tauri stars are Procedurally Generated, so they got the proper designation.
From the wiki link provided above by CMDR Hag:
I think it's silly that we can't scoop the T Tauri stars or any of the other cooler stars. Almost every star except degenerate and carbon stars are composed almost entirely of hydrogen, which the fuel our ships run on. The dwarfs and failed planets are quite cool and should be at least as scoopable Gas Giants which were apparently scoopable in previous versions of Elite.
From the wiki link provided above by CMDR Hag:
| Spectral type | G5V:e |
|---|
I think it's silly that we can't scoop the T Tauri stars or any of the other cooler stars. Almost every star except degenerate and carbon stars are composed almost entirely of hydrogen, which the fuel our ships run on. The dwarfs and failed planets are quite cool and should be at least as scoopable Gas Giants which were apparently scoopable in previous versions of Elite.
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I didn't screenshot the fuel scooping because I didn't think that far. Of course T Tauri stars also have spectral types. They send out light, after all. Still, there's a difference between an old pre-main sequence star and a young main sequence star. In the description it clearly states that it's the letter (séquence principale). In Hag's wiki link the age is stated to be 600000 years, not 2,4 million years.
Granted, I don't expect every digit in the game to fit what scientists say. It's just such prominents where I think it's interesting to see whether they fit or not. Sure, it's details and one hasn't to bother with it. Perhaps the whole T Tauri mess would make more sense with circumstellar disks being thrown into the game. That would make the scoop traps a little more obvious, too. Maybe the modern fuel scoops can't deal with lower densities.
I just have the explorer's patch in my head, somewhere hidden deep under the to do-lists for PP and CQC.
- reskin Pluto
- add curcumstellar disks / accretion disks
- add jets / pulsars
- fix T Tauri
- rethink what's scoopable
- Thargoids
Indeed those changes would make our lives easier. A few points to consider when comparing Wikipedia estimates to what actual scientists say (not always the same thing) and then comparing those two contrasting ideas to what the game decided to display:
1) Ages of T Tauri stars (and distances) are extremely gross estimates they can vary by 300-1000% normally, so ED's figure of 2.4 M is well within the ballpark. This is in because our calculations are based on
- brightness which is variable and unstable
- coarse evolutionary models that have missing or highly estimated unknown variables
- surface composition which may or may not accurately represent internal structure
mostly, we know that T Tauri are very young stars because they still contain certain elements which get destroyed in nuclear fusion. Exactly how young depends on a number of variables, many of which are estimates, and this prevents us from pinpointing their age.
2) not all T Tauri stars have disks. Just as not all stars have planets.
Wikipedia is nice for rough (often conflicting) info, but to put that in any kind of meaningful astronomical context, this site is often far more useful:
http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/T/TTauri.html
1) Ages of T Tauri stars (and distances) are extremely gross estimates they can vary by 300-1000% normally, so ED's figure of 2.4 M is well within the ballpark. This is in because our calculations are based on
- brightness which is variable and unstable
- coarse evolutionary models that have missing or highly estimated unknown variables
- surface composition which may or may not accurately represent internal structure
mostly, we know that T Tauri are very young stars because they still contain certain elements which get destroyed in nuclear fusion. Exactly how young depends on a number of variables, many of which are estimates, and this prevents us from pinpointing their age.
2) not all T Tauri stars have disks. Just as not all stars have planets.
Wikipedia is nice for rough (often conflicting) info, but to put that in any kind of meaningful astronomical context, this site is often far more useful:
http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/T/TTauri.html
I've lost trust in Wikipedia when I researched on the topic of Orphic theogony. Also, I grew wary of smaller websites, as they thend to copy/reword from Wikipedia. Nevertheless I will check out this website, thanks for that.
I didn't want to imply that every T Tauri should get a circumstellar disk. In retrospective it admittedly sounds like it, but it was more into the direction of "those who can have them are T Tauri", for some general direction. Overall it seems to be a question of where a T Tauri ends being a T Tauri. On the website you linked it's stated that T Tauri may only exist in nebula or very young clusters. Given that in game T Tauris are spread all across the galaxy, within the bobble and outside, this restriction isn't given anymore for this problem. The star T Tauri is located within a nebula, and even if it still can count as a T Tauri with 2,4 mY, the star simply doesn't carry any T Tauri characteristic in game. Currently, the only thing that tells us whether a star is a T Tauri is the not working fuel scoop, the description "T Tauri" next to the radar and the description of T Tauris in the SysMap (TM). Non of that is given here, as shown in the posts above.
So while your points against this issue are more than reasonable, I must say that very few else than the shown methods exists to define whether something is a T Tauri. And since they are in game, their "mother" should be included properly (by the game's own standards) as well. Overall I must conclude that the problem is less the descriptions on the T Tauri star, and more the way T Tauri stars are implemented over all. Especially now it seems to be thin, lacking the precision that would be needed to make then unique, read distinguish them from main sequence stars (albeit that may not always be the case even if everything would be properly introduced).
If we take away the age and description, the only way left to identify a T Tauri in game is the fuel scoop. And that's a bit saddening. So, the above "fix T Tauri" should really read "fix T Tauris". Please, correct me if I'm drifting too far into the extreme.
Wikipedia is OK but should be taken with a grain of salt. I have a degree in Astrophysics so I can navigate the error bars a little more safely and see things in context. The so called smaller sites hosted by actual PhDs like David Darling and Ned Wright Cosmology are more reliable in most cases because they give you the basic concepts and the most conservative estimates and in the simplest terms possible for a lay person to follow.
As for "nebula", darling is not necessarily referring to the bright diffuse named objects you see in the distance. Or even the smaller system based nebulae you occasionally see on the galmap. He is simply talking about the usual interstellar gas that surrounds the immediate region that T Tauri gasses collapsed out of. If you look closely even at the GalMap, you'll see that the entire plane of the Milky Way is permeated by dark gases called the Interstellar Medium (ISM). This mostly molecular hydrogen that becomes both the raw material and the fuel for stellar formation. In its cold diffuse form, it is the dark black bar (shown as orange in game) that obscures our view of the center of the Galaxy. If you look, you'll find most of the T Tauri stars are located nearby or inside the plane of these dust lanes. That is what Darling meant. Of course, you will also find T Tauri stars inside obvious formation regions that haven't dispersed yet, like the Orion etc. but if you zoom out, you will see that the spiral arms themselves are a kind of "nebula" in that they are regions of star formation with "dense" molecular gas clouds some of which is ionized.
As for the game's implementation of star types and fuel scooping mechanics etc, there aren't always stark lines in nature like the ones that we find in the game. Objects can fall into more than one category, and straddle the fence between definitions in ways that are frustrating and mysterious. Then the models we use to make predictions have to be reworked so that they fit the data. I agree that this model is particularly odd because it is supposed to be the prototypical T Tauri star and yet defies its own scooping rule, but as said above, I think T Tauri should be scoopable, but with perhaps a higher risk of burning up, that varied and even included the possibility of being consumed by the star as it expanded and contracted.
As for "nebula", darling is not necessarily referring to the bright diffuse named objects you see in the distance. Or even the smaller system based nebulae you occasionally see on the galmap. He is simply talking about the usual interstellar gas that surrounds the immediate region that T Tauri gasses collapsed out of. If you look closely even at the GalMap, you'll see that the entire plane of the Milky Way is permeated by dark gases called the Interstellar Medium (ISM). This mostly molecular hydrogen that becomes both the raw material and the fuel for stellar formation. In its cold diffuse form, it is the dark black bar (shown as orange in game) that obscures our view of the center of the Galaxy. If you look, you'll find most of the T Tauri stars are located nearby or inside the plane of these dust lanes. That is what Darling meant. Of course, you will also find T Tauri stars inside obvious formation regions that haven't dispersed yet, like the Orion etc. but if you zoom out, you will see that the spiral arms themselves are a kind of "nebula" in that they are regions of star formation with "dense" molecular gas clouds some of which is ionized.
As for the game's implementation of star types and fuel scooping mechanics etc, there aren't always stark lines in nature like the ones that we find in the game. Objects can fall into more than one category, and straddle the fence between definitions in ways that are frustrating and mysterious. Then the models we use to make predictions have to be reworked so that they fit the data. I agree that this model is particularly odd because it is supposed to be the prototypical T Tauri star and yet defies its own scooping rule, but as said above, I think T Tauri should be scoopable, but with perhaps a higher risk of burning up, that varied and even included the possibility of being consumed by the star as it expanded and contracted.
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I seriously didn't know about the ISM (what for me always was International School of Management). I noticed it, but always went basically with "it's stuff". That thins out my argument arguably. I do wonder, are there T Tauris in intergalactic space, just like there are lone wanderers, planets that got kicked out of their orbits? Since some orbit an other sun in a binary system, I could think it possible. Then those wandering T Tauris would find themselves in a similar position as those, who were born in a low-density zone of nebulae or the ISM. The question that would be if they're "locked" in the T Tauri phase, as they can't grow in mass anymore, or if they are set to main sequence stars, because, even if the mass is much lower than it could have been, at some point the inner fusion process starts accelerating off? I guess that this could make for another indicator, as Darling writes that lithium "is rapidly destroyed in stellar interiors." The D-scanner could possibly check for the lithium containments as an indicator, no?
Simultaneously, with all these exceptions, I have to wonder why it is that science propellers so fast into the 'we tell truth' direction? It seems to have become widely something that, whatever it says, speaks truth. With what comes the growing counter-movement of those, who see science more and more critical. In a book about quantum physics and transcendental philosophy, the author wrote that modern science closed its doors for the curious gazes of philosophers, and that it shouldn't deal with them. Or he quoted someone who said it, I frankly can't remember it that accurate. And yet, the deeper you dig, the more science seems to become again what it once was: natural philosophy. Explanations are sought and for that sometimes models have to be made that are very vague and may have very many exclusions to them. The T Tauris seem to be more and more of a good example for that.
The T Tauri phase is a very brief moment in stellar evolution that happens right after the star collapses and only lasts millions of years (an eye blink in galactic time). Star formation seems to be limited to certain dense regions of galactic structure, so no, it is unlikely that there are T Tauri stars floating in the dark void between galaxies. There are however dark matter filaments that inhabit that parts of that "empty" space but we don't really know what they are composed of yet. All we know is that it is non-luminous.
Very well. Since I can't hunt them in intergalactic space (to stubbornly proof their existence there), I guess I'll be back to hunt UAs soon. Thanks for all the clearing up work! My mind is a mess sometimes.