AR Sco
Snigger. That is all.
Scientists trying to crack the mystery behind the fastest-pulsating white dwarf have found that its brightness levels change over a timescale of decades. AR Scorpii is a distant, peculiar binary star system located 380 light years away. It’s made of a collapsed white dwarf star circling its larger red dwarf companion. It was …
It won't matter. A properly calibrating "weighing machine" gives you the mass of the object being weighed.
But, obviously, if you use a balance calibrated for earth if will give a silly answer. And there are various caveats about relativity and non-inertial frames.
I'll leave you to write your own jokes.
> if you use a balance calibrated for earth
Well, actually, if you use a balance and always use the same standard weights (masses - yes yes we know they're different things, especially outside of a 1g field) on one side of the balance, it will register the same weight/mass no matter where you use it.
Your bog-standard springy scale, on the other hand, is another story entirely.
Well that is assuming that inertial mass is equivalent to gravitational mass. I always was uncomfortable about that myself; I have quite a large gravitational mass (compared to most skinny buggers) but my inertial mass is amazing when the wife asks me to cut the grass or do the washing up.
Mind you, when it comes down to software or other such matters my inertial mass makes a feather look like a lead cannonball.
I knew white dwarfs, today I've learned about red dwarfs. They can last trillions of years because they are convective, meaning they don't build up helium in the core.
Science. You can read about for thirty years but there's always something to surprise you.
It depends on whether you believe in continuous expansion or a big bang followed by a big crunch. If the first, the universe will get bigger, things in it will get more isolated, and stars will run down until eventually everything fades to black. If the latter, the red dwarves will collapse back into the singularity before they run out of fuel.
I do not expect to be around to find out for certain which will happen, though.
My theory is that it's likely to be a star surrounded by pre or post planet debris that is coalescing into larger blobs causing the light to be stronger when they're more organised and then they bash into each other every so often splitting up scattering the light, then they coalesce again. So, we're observing a brightening and dimming effect as the light/radiation is obscured/scattered and then picks up again, depending on how organised the debris is at any given time.
It would make sense to me that solar systems would go through long periods of stuff coming together and bashing into each other and splitting apart until eventually the only objects that survive are ones with clear paths and you get an organised, non-chaotic solar system like ours.
It's also quite possible that loose debris (in huge quantities) could do something like that very quickly. It could be just balls of rubble / dust coming together then smashing apart in a matter of a few years.