DLD 8/14/09 Stars Shooting Around

How ’bout them Raiders last night? It’s just preseason, I know; however, the team has a lot of upside.

Cameron Bryan Coffey has agreed to a contract with the Baltimore Orioles that will pay him one of the largest signing bonuses ever given to any player taken outside the top ten rounds of the draft according to his agent Rob Martin.

Martin did not give the specific value of the contract, but Major League Baseball sources said Thursday the Orioles are giving Coffey a $990,000 signing bonus.

Adrian Beltre might want to think about using a cup in the future. The Mariners third baseman was placed on the 15-day disabled list with an injured testicle after a ground ball took a bad hop Wednesday night.

There was some tearing and internal bleeding as Beltre doesn’t wear a cup.

If he doesn’t need surgery, he is expected to miss 10 days to two weeks.

Here. Ellis is just not getting the love on fantasy book covers this year. Which makes me weep, just a little.

http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/index.php/the-al-rookie-of-the-year-favorites

Is anyone watching the Pirates-Cubs game on WGN? Just check out the box score.

The Red Sox are close to finalizing a waiver deal to acquire shortstop Alex Gonzalez from the Reds, according to a source.

Gonzalez makes $5.37 million this year and will be a free agent at the end of the season.

He played for Boston in 2006.

Dodgers catcher Russell Martin has struggled this season, and some around the game believe that he lacks the strength he once had.

“There are 2-0 pitches, 3-1 pitches that he’s missing,” a National League scout said according to a source. “In the past, he could sit there and punish them. He doesn’t swing with the same intensity that he used to.”

Martin understands the speculation, but hopes that people don’t see him in that light.

On this day seven years ago, I went to my first A’s game.

Not Landon Powell

to the description of PaulThomas as a "star."

are pretty rad. When a star begins to run out of fuel, its internal temperature and pressure drop, which causes it to begin to collapse. This is sort of a long process because the process of collapsing boosts the temperature back up and it starts to process heavier elements to create energy (instead of just fusing two deuteriums to form a helium).

But eventually it really runs out of fuel and suffers a final gravitational collapse. How far this collapse goes depends on the mass of the star. White dwarfs are in the least massive category and their collapse is ultimately halted by the Fermi pressure of their electrons.

Fermi pressure arises from a fundamental symmetry of particle physics. Fermions are a class of particles that includes electons, protons, neutrons, and lots of other stuff. They have the property that, in any system of identical fermions, if you exchange two particles it is the same as multiplying the wave function of the system by -1.

So now imagine that you have two fermions in your system that have identical quantum numbers. There is literally now way to tell them apart. So if you swapped the two particles, the system would be exactly the same as when you started. However, fermion statistics tells you that swapping the particles should give you -1 times the original system. -1 does not equal 1, so we have a paradox. The result of this is the Pauli exclusion principle, which tells you that you can never have two fermions with identical quantum numbers.

Ok, now getting back to the collapsing star. Gravity is squishing everything together, but that means cramming a whole shitload of electrons into a very small space. The electrons have some finite temperature, so they can’t just start occupying arbitrarily high energy states. The result is that you reach a point where there just aren’t enough quantum numbers to go around and this halts the collapse of the star.

So then the white dwarfs pretty much just sit there. They still glow a little bit because some small fraction of the electrons still have excess thermal energy above the point where they become totally degenerate. This dissipates away very slowly, so the white dwarf becomes dimmer and dimmer. Eventually, I guess that it would reach thermal equilibrium with the rest of the universe and be a cold ball of degenerate matter. But I hear that the amount of time this would take is much more than the age of the universe.

Stars — Ageless Beauty

Trembling Blue Stars — Idyllwild

Time to unrec this one, folks.