As seen on Face book...

[Hanuman]

Several of my friends have been sharing and liking this on Facebook today. I'm not sure I agree with it, so I've been leaving the comment below (in a slightly more profane-for-comic-effect manner, but you'll get the idea). Be interested to see what views you lot think. Feel free to debate or correct. I'm no expert but in the context I left the comment I may as well be.

My comment has been

"That star is most probably not dead. The stars you can see are within our own galaxy, the Milky Way which is estimated to be 120,000 light years across. We're on a spiral arm about 27,000 light years from the centre so the furthest distance to a star on the edge of our galaxy would be approx 87,000 light years. Chances are though that a star at that distance wouldn't be visible to the naked eye as you've got to look through a lot of other stars, stellar matter and get past the supermassive black hole at galactic centre (and remember nothing, not even light can escape a black hole).

It's generally accepted that that the furthest star visible to the naked eye is Deneb in Cygnus (look directly above tonight - you'll see a triangle of three brighter stars - it's the upper left one) at only 2,600 light years away.

Given the lifespan of a main sequence star in in excess of 10 billion years then 2,600 years is only 0.00026% of that time. Not very long at all in cosmic terms.

Keep on wishing. Obviously it doesn't work because the universe is flipping huge and your stuff is of no consequence in it.

[DirkSteele]

The 10 billion years you quote for a typical main sequence life time is the duration one would expect from a G class dwarf star like the Sun. However Deneb is an A2Ia class white super giant star with an estimated mass of approx 20x that of the Sun. As such it time on the main sequence will be limited to a few million years so the 2,600 years represents a percentage several orders of magnitude larger than you calculated.

However, I did enjoy the general theme of the post.

Clear Skies,

[Darkstar_1]

Quality

[Alastair Rae]

I thought wishing on a star was making a wish when you see a "shooting star" or meteor. Or have I had that wrong all these years?

[Rihard]

Several of my friends have been sharing and liking this on Facebook today. I'm not sure I agree with it, so I've been leaving the comment below (in a slightly more profane-for-comic-effect manner, but you'll get the idea). Be interested to see what views you lot think. Feel free to debate or correct. I'm no expert but in the context I left the comment I may as well be.

My comment has been

"That star is most probably not dead. The stars you can see are within our own galaxy, the Milky Way which is estimated to be 120,000 light years across. We're on a spiral arm about 27,000 light years from the centre so the furthest distance to a star on the edge of our galaxy would be approx 87,000 light years. Chances are though that a star at that distance wouldn't be visible to the naked eye as you've got to look through a lot of other stars, stellar matter and get past the supermassive black hole at galactic centre (and remember nothing, not even light can escape a black hole).

It's generally accepted that that the furthest star visible to the naked eye is Deneb in Cygnus (look directly above tonight - you'll see a triangle of three brighter stars - it's the upper left one) at only 2,600 light years away.

Given the lifespan of a main sequence star in in excess of 10 billion years then 2,600 years is only 0.00026% of that time. Not very long at all in cosmic terms.

Keep on wishing. Obviously it doesn't work because the universe is flipping huge and your stuff is of no consequence in it.

[Astro-Nova]

if that message was true the star would have been in another galaxy

but that message has just been written by someone who would not know anything about astronomy, neither will his/hers readers.

[knobby]

I thought wishing on a star was making a wish when you see a "shooting star" or meteor. Or have I had that wrong all these years?

I thought it was a song by Rose Royce