View Single Post
  #4 (permalink)  
Old 18-March-2004, 01:24 PM
antoniseb's Avatar
antoniseb antoniseb is offline
Administrator
 
Join Date: Jul 2005
Location: Berlin MA
Posts: 16,015
Default

Here's a link to a long article [32 pages] about an observed Iron Sun.

http://www.arxiv.org/PS_cache/astro-ph/pdf...403/0403402.pdf

This star is a close binary 0.7 solar-mass companion to an 11 solar-mass black hole. The article guesses that the star was enveloped by the pre-supernova and spiraled in through the thin outer layers, and that the supernova happened before it coalesced into the core of the giant.

The article reports an Fe/H ratio of 0.14 +/- 0.12. Since Iron is substantially heavier than hydrogen, this means that much more of the mass of this star's atmosphere is Iron than is hydrogen.

I think this example shows that an Iron Sun is possible, but doesn't speak well for the likelyhood that our sun is one of these, as we don't have a large black hole orbiting our sun, and we don't have much iron in the sun's atmosphere.
__________________
Forming opinions as we speak