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[QUOTE]Originally posted by bX: [QB] Yeah it's kind of depressing to see the solar system to scale. Everything is so tiny and far away. I mean I suspect part of the reason Joss had things clustered [URL=http://flareupload.pleh.net/uploads/419/TrainJob-PlanetsInSky.jpg]so close[/URL] had to do with that not being as interesting visually. So forgive me if I'm being redundant, but giants aren't so much a type of star as they are at a [URL=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main-sequence]stage[/URL] of the [URL=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hertzsprung-Russell_diagram]sequence[/URL] in their [URL=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_cycle_of_a_star]stellar life-cycle[/URL]. Where the latter stages it's true take eons, but they seemed to me to be fraught with stability and size issues as their fusion fires move further from their cores. Everything I know I learned from Carl Sagan and Cosmos, so I could be totally full of shit. but from [URL=http://www.teknat.uu.se/forskning/program.php?vetenskapsid=1&hforskomr=2&id=126&lang=en]here[/URL]: [QUOTE]Towards the end of their lives, most stars, including our sun, evolve into red giant stars. They then become some ten thousand times as luminous as the sun is today. The outermost layers (called the atmosphere) of such a star are cool enough to enable the formation of molecules and dust grains. Most red giants are so-called long-period variables, stars that change their luminosity over periods of around a year. These changes are caused by stellar pulsations - the stars expand and contract periodically. Shock waves will then develop in the atmospheres and change the densities and temperatures and hereby the conditions for molecules and dust to form. These are very efficient in absorbing the stellar radiation from below and the radiation pressure can cause a massive outflow of gas and dust, a stellar wind.[/QUOTE]Some searching reveals I may have been hasty in discarding the notion of [URL=http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0503520]habitable giant stars[/URL]. The previously linked article hypothesizes for certain stars 10^9 years of a stable habitable zone 7 to 22 AU, which is pretty huge for pretty long. [/QB][/QUOTE]
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