• Welcome to the new COTI server. We've moved the Citizens to a new server. Please let us know in the COTI Website issue forum if you find any problems.
  • We, the systems administration staff, apologize for this unexpected outage of the boards. We have resolved the root cause of the problem and there should be no further disruptions.

Stellar Spectra Classification M0... D?

Red Dwarf! :)

(my inner Lister made me say it ;) )

I bet Holly knows the answer to your question, after all it's got an IQ of 6,000... give or take...

(actually a foggy memory is saying it does mean a red dwarf, but I could be wrong)
 
The stage V like our sun G2V, that is actually a dwarf.

BTW, why did the title change the D to lowercase? Very strange.
 
BTW, why did the title change the D to lowercase? Very strange.

Proof that it means dwarf, it shrunk it... ;)

Don't know * , but fixed it ;)

* something to do with the leading "..." without a space maybe?

EDIT: Didn't notice the link to the stellar classifications earlier but that's twigged another vague memory of changes over time to said nomenclature, or different ones being used by different polities (in the real world I mean).
 
Thanks, weird for a minute there looking again and it was a capital D again. Like "hey wait a minute..."
 
...well there you go, in that same wiki (though I only skimmed it, didn't actually READ it)... D is for degenerate, aka White Dwarf... the evil alternate universe counterpart of the Red Dwarf where Lister is the cat, Rimmer survives, Cryton is the hologram, Holly is the cat and Cat is the computer... I think... ;)
 
Thanks, weird for a minute there looking again and it was a capital D again. Like "hey wait a minute..."

You're welcome. Please remain seated until the thread title has come to a full edit for you own sanity...

;)

...figured on second reading that I'd tag on a bit more description to the title too :)

Oh, and I'm still waiting for Rimmer to de-rez, he's glaring at me...
 
Like you say though, it is for white dwarfs, an extended type like D5. The "0" in M0 makes it almost a giant, so it would be a giant dwarf?

*throws tron disk at Rimmer
 
Last edited:
What does the D stand for, I have looked through ct sources like scouts, smc, sollie am and haven't found anything...
They're white dwarfs, as I believe was mentioned above.

And actually, I'm pretty sure that they're covered in Scouts (though I don't have the book directly available at the moment to verify). There's a stats table on them somewhere in there, although I'm personally rather dubious on applying it. My layman's understanding of stellar physics tells me that class M white dwarfs can't exist in our universe for billions of years yet (if at all -- I think they're actually 'black' dwarfs), and the larger stars (A & B) would more likely degenerate into either neutron stars or black holes.

There's also way too many of them. This is neither here nor there as far as the shared OTU is concerned, but I've retconned the vast majority of them into brown dwarfs IMTU.
 
They're white dwarfs, as I believe was mentioned above.

And actually, I'm pretty sure that they're covered in Scouts (though I don't have the book directly available at the moment to verify). There's a stats table on them somewhere in there, although I'm personally rather dubious on applying it. My layman's understanding of stellar physics tells me that class M white dwarfs can't exist in our universe for billions of years yet (if at all -- I think they're actually 'black' dwarfs), and the larger stars (A & B) would more likely degenerate into either neutron stars or black holes.

There's also way too many of them. This is neither here nor there as far as the shared OTU is concerned, but I've retconned the vast majority of them into brown dwarfs IMTU.

D is white dwarfs, such as DW, DB, etc.; and there is a chart for them (I am looking at LBB6 right now) and it even seems like it gives some result for a stage D on the tables, so for example M0D is possible to be rolled up, same as M9D, etc., just no explaination. I have also looked at trallermap and core data to try to find where it being taken from. I have actually looked at the data quite a bit until I noticed the discrepancy.

The incongruity is that M0V and M0D would be the same.
 
The incongruity is that M0V and M0D would be the same.
No, they are not. A white dwarf is an entirely different thing from a dwarf star. Red (type M) dwarfs and yellow (type G) dwarfs are in the main sequence -- that is, they're still fusing hydrogen, and have plenty of it left to spare. A white dwarf is what remains after a star of a certain size (such as our yellow dwarf sun, Sol) has used up all its fuel and has become a tightly-packed globe of slowly-cooling, degenerate matter. It is, in essence, the corpse of an ordinary star.

White dwarfs are also much smaller and denser than any main sequence dwarf star; Proxima Centauri (a fairly typical red dwarf star) is at least half again as large as Jupiter, while your average white dwarf is barely larger than our own Earth.

Our current understanding of stellar evolution has red dwarfs eventually turning into white dwarfs too, but we have no proof of this because it is frankly impossible for them to exist yet. Red dwarfs burn their fuel so slowly that even the largest of them will have enough fuel to remain in the main sequence for hundreds of billions of years -- or many, many times longer than the current age of the universe. That the LBB6 tables create M-based white dwarfs so readily is IMHO the biggest clunker of that generation system.
 
The Ancients sucked the energy out of the proto-white dwarf M0 stars, hastening their advancement into the state...

;)

I know... but it's Traveller. Not our reality. Grandfather and his Children exist, they had some 300,000 years to mess about, and the technology to make just about anything possible.

Maybe that's how one makes pocket universes. Or moves or obliterates whole worlds. Or... whatever else the Ancients were dabbling in. Time warping? Really, who knows?
 
Or more likely the authors were using scientific data and theory that is 35+ years old.

I found this online:

About 90 percent of all stars are main sequence dwarfs of spectral type F through M (excluding 9 percent white dwarfs, 0.5 percent red giants, and 0.5 percent everything else).
So if you Wikipedia star classification and use the percentages given in the table there for randomly determining star type you have covered 99.5% of possible star types.

Course this is ignoring there is no such thing as an empty hex issue ;)

Ignore the stellar data presented in SMC, M:0 etc, it's all flawed.
 
Last edited:
Or more likely the authors were using scientific data and theory that is 35+ years old.

I found this online:


So if you Wikipedia star classification and use the percentages given in the table there for randomly determining star type you have covered 99.5% of possible star types.

Course this is ignoring there is no such thing as an empty hex issue ;)

Ignore the stellar data presented in SMC, M:0 etc, it's all flawed.

Wikipedia's is wrong, too. Compare their numbers to a given sample of an actual current star catalogue.
 
Or more likely the authors were using scientific data and theory that is 35+ years old.

I found this online:


So if you Wikipedia star classification and use the percentages given in the table there for randomly determining star type you have covered 99.5% of possible star types.

Course this is ignoring there is no such thing as an empty hex issue ;)

Ignore the stellar data presented in SMC, M:0 etc, it's all flawed.

No, they are not. A white dwarf is an entirely different thing from a dwarf star. Red (type M) dwarfs and yellow (type G) dwarfs are in the main sequence -- that is, they're still fusing hydrogen, and have plenty of it left to spare. A white dwarf is what remains after a star of a certain size (such as our yellow dwarf sun, Sol) has used up all its fuel and has become a tightly-packed globe of slowly-cooling, degenerate matter. It is, in essence, the corpse of an ordinary star.

White dwarfs are also much smaller and denser than any main sequence dwarf star; Proxima Centauri (a fairly typical red dwarf star) is at least half again as large as Jupiter, while your average white dwarf is barely larger than our own Earth.

Our current understanding of stellar evolution has red dwarfs eventually turning into white dwarfs too, but we have no proof of this because it is frankly impossible for them to exist yet. Red dwarfs burn their fuel so slowly that even the largest of them will have enough fuel to remain in the main sequence for hundreds of billions of years -- or many, many times longer than the current age of the universe. That the LBB6 tables create M-based white dwarfs so readily is IMHO the biggest clunker of that generation system.

Technically stage V is dwarf, but it is most likely my fault for trying to mix reality with the sysgen, it is deceptively similar though.
 
Technically stage V is dwarf, but it is most likely my fault for trying to mix reality with the sysgen, it is deceptively similar though.

V is the Main Sequence. V class stars are "dwarf" stars because they are not giants, except for the reds, and even they are "dwarf" by mass. I through IV are giants of various types, classified by mass. D are burnouts, now off the main sequence.

T5 *may* have a category for brown dwarf stars, but since they are considered very unlikely to have systems of more than gravel, they are stellar curiosities in a game where the star map is actually a commerce map.

CT and MT also had class VI stars, back when they were thought to be more common than later sky surveys showed. Class VI stars were removed from the tables starting with TNE. TNE also reduced the occurrence of D stars in the stellar primary position to almost nil. They are still pretty common in the Companion role, though. To get the adjusted version of the stars in the Marches, you want the Regency Sourcebook for TNE.
 
Back
Top