Talk:Algol

message: Is the star system really younger than 300 million years as suggested by the box? That seems pretty young.—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 12.24.60.12 (talk • contribs).
:Yes. Massive B-class stars have a main sequence life span of 11-400 million years. — RJH (talk) 21:53, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Algol

message: Demon Star redirects here, perhaps an explanation of this could be made in the article? Miremare 17:38, 2 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Demon star 

message: the chilmead material which I guess Allen read. Nice to get one step further down the source-line. cheers,  Casliber (talk · contribs) 10:15, 21 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Weird  

message: As part of the WikiProject Good Articles, we're doing sweeps to go over all of the current GAs and see if they still meet the GA criteria. I'm specifically going over all of the "Planets and Moons" articles. I believe the article currently meets the criteria and should remain listed as a Good article. I have made several minor corrections throughout the article. In addition I removed the movie poster lacking a fair use rationale for use in this article. I also removed the unsourced mentions in popular culture, and listed them below. If sources can be found then they can be readded to the article. Rather than developing a list, try to convert the relevant information into prose. Altogether the article is well-written and is still in great shape after its passing in 2006. Continue to improve the article making sure all new information is properly sourced and neutral. I would recommend going through all of the citations and updating the access dates and fixing any dead links. If you have any questions, let me know on my talk page and I'll get back to you as soon as I can. I have updated the article history to reflect this review. Happy editing! --Nehrams2020 (talk) 01:27, 3 March 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: GA Sweeps Review: Pass

message: System contains the following: "Algol is 92.8 light years from Earth; however, about 7.3 million years ago it passed within 9.8 light years".  If that was the case its travelled over 10 times the speed of light. I've checked the reference to get accurate information but it is subscription. Can someone please check and amend. Thanks.--94.194.237.87 (talk) 22:11, 25 October 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: 92.8 minus 9.8 LY = 83 LY travelled in 7.3 MILLION years implies a travel speed (with respect to the Solar system, presumably in a galactically-rotating frame of reference) of 0.00001137 LY/year, which is approximately 12271 km/hr. This is comparable to the orbital speed of the Earth with respect to the sun. Evidently a perfectly reasonable speed in celestial mechanics.(talk) 11:17, 22 February 2010)
What got me following these threads was the question : how long has the Earth been within / will the Earth remain in the region of Algol's sky where it appears as an eclipsing binary?(talk) 11:17, 22 February 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Error in Article

message: It's odd that the inclinations of the two component pairs (A vs B and AB vs C) are given in different quadrants compared to the plane-of-the-sky (97degrees in one case ; 83 degrees in the other). This could mean that they've a 14degree difference between the planes of orbit (large, but not unprecedented within Sol), or that one of the components is orbiting in approximately the plane of the others, but retrograde. I'm also noting that the travel path implied elsewhere in the article is 6.04degrees to the line of sight (and therefore about 84 degrees to the plane of the sky in that direction). This could be an interesting coincidence, or it could mean that Algol has only just entered into it's period of being an eclipsing binary, or is just about to leave it. I don't have the geometry to work it out, and I'm pretty sure that the article doesn't have sufficient information to work it out.
Yes, I know, "original research" ; but it's an interesting question, which may reflect on numerous other aspects of the article. Consider the implications to the most dismal of pseudosciences, astrology, if it turned out that Algol only started blinking at us at the time of the Trojan war.
Aidan Karley (talk) 11:33, 22 February 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Inclination terminology 

message: Makesense64, I am going to undo your deletion, to allow the content to be seen for what it is.  I have just placed a notice about this situation on the Neutral Point of view noticeboard and asked for some guidance or clarification.  I have said that I will undo your last deletion and ask you to leave the content in place so it can be evaluated by those with more experience than you or I. I am not sure of the protocal for these things, never having done this before, but I will place a message for you on your talk page because I have fowarded my view that you are trying to make this matter more divisive than it needs to be, for reasons that are not of benefit to members of the WP astronomy project. I hope the members of the astronomy project will read my report too, and realise that there is no intention for astrologers to "take over" astronomy pages, and you are blowing this matter out of proportion and losing touch with common sense. This is my personal opinion of course, but sincere and genuinely held, based on the familiar and consistent cycle of me trying to propose content and you then arguing for its swift deletion. Zac Δ talk  15:13, 9 July 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Raising the matter on the Neutral Point of View noticeboard  

message: I removed the following paragraph of quotes because it is drifting off topic from a discussion of the star, and it is not needed for the remainder of the section:
:Literary references to the malevolence of the Gorgon's Head can be found in sources as early as Homer's Iliad "...the Gorgon's head, a ghastly sight, deformed and dreadful, and a sight of woe",Homer, The Iliad (c. 800 BCE), Bk V; Samuel Butler translation online at http://classics.mit.edu/Homer/iliad.html; retrieved 8 July 2011 and as recently as the works of Oscar Wilde "Like a red rod of flame, stony and steeled, The Gorgon's head its leaden eyeballs rolled, And writhed its snaky horrors through the shield, And gaped aghast with bloodless lips and cold".Wilde, O, Charmides, 1890; online at 
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Charmides_(Wilde); retrieved 8 July 2010
Regards, RJH (talk) 19:40, 10 July 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: No problems with that.  Thanks for your contribution. Zac Δ talk  05:34, 11 July 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Removed off-topic paragraph 

message: Based on what I learned here , and as a member of WikiProject Astrology, I am removing the WikiProject Astrology tag that was put on here recently. Very few astrology articles link here, so this is outside the scope of the Astrology project. MakeSense64 (talk) 16:14, 11 July 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Removed WikiProject Astrology tag 

message: Hi, the sentence "Medieval Arabic commanders tried to ensure that no important battle began whilst the light of Algol was weak", which I removed yesterday (and which was reverted today) appears to be derived solely from a 1950 article by a certain dr. Lomer in the German astrological(?) periodical Kosmobiologie. I am unable to verify the source cited by Lomer as this periodical is not unline, nor available in any Dutch library. When I say that this source appears to be unreliable, you may say that I am biased but I have read quite a lot about Arabic star lore and history in the past and I have never come across such a statement. I think that it would be best to delete this statement until someone can provide a verifiable source. As James Randi said: "Unusual claims require unusually good proof". AstroLynx (talk) 09:32, 21 July 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm sure you were right. It may be true, but we would need to source it to an expert in the Islamic Middle Ages, and such an expert wouldn't be publishing in a journal called Kosmobiologie. Itsmejudith (talk) 10:04, 21 July 2011 (UTC)

text: Sounds a reasonable enough reason to remove to me. I'd got the impression it was only removed because it gave the impression the variability of Algol was know earlier than said (which is also a doubt but not enough if it was well documented). Dmcq (talk) 11:50, 21 July 2011 (UTC)
replies: text:  O.K., I have removed the dubious claim. As soon as someone can provide a more reliable (and preferably verifiable) source it can go back again. AstroLynx (talk) 12:06, 21 July 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Medieval Arabic commanders

message: Hello! This is a note to let the editors of this article know that :File:Algol AB movie imaged with the CHARA interferometer - labeled.gif will be appearing as picture of the day on June 16, 2014. You can view and edit the POTD blurb at Template:POTD/2014-06-16. If this article needs any attention or maintenance, it would be preferable if that could be done before its appearance on the Main Page. Thanks! — Crisco 1492 (talk) 09:55, 31 May 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[:File:Algol AB movie imaged with the CHARA interferometer - labeled.gif]]

message: Algol is described as deriving from the Arabic 'ra's al-ghūl : head (ra's) of the ogre (al-ghūl) (see "ghoul").'
It makes more sense to me to simply translate it as 'head of the ghoul', since ghoul is a perfectly good English word, and ogres are something different.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Richierocks (talk • contribs) 05:29, 28 February 2015 (UTC)
thread_title: Algol etymology

message: I'm going to amend the section on the names of Algol that reads:
″Beta Persei is the star's Bayer designation. The name Algol derives from Arabic رأس الغول raʾs al-ghūl : head (raʾs) of the ogre (al-ghūl) (see "ghoul"). The English name "Demon Star" is a direct translation of this.″
Obviously, "Demon Star" is not a direct translation of of the Arabic name; the direct translation of the Arabic name is "head of the ogre", as noted in the very same sentence. Mpaniello (talk) 00:27, 8 November 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: Fair point Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 02:31, 8 November 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Not a Direct Translation, Obviously 

message: Algol B redirects to this site, but I can find no mention of or definition of Algol B. Please provide.
Rwflammang (talk) 01:11, 9 April 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Algol B 

message: Perhaps it's because of it being three or more stars with similar designations, but I find it all very confusing.
:In 1881, the Harvard astronomer Edward Charles Pickering presented evidence that Algol was actually an eclipsing binary.[21] This was confirmed a few years later, in 1889, when the Potsdam astronomer Hermann Carl Vogel found periodic doppler shifts in the spectrum of Algol, inferring variations in the radial velocity of this binary system.[22]
Which two of the stars are we talking about here? Or is one of the two stars in this part of the article actually a binary itself?
:Thus Algol became one of the first known spectroscopic binaries.
The images all show clearly separate dots though. Was it a spectroscopic binary at the time, but not any more now that optics have improved? Please clarify.
:Joel Stebbins at the University of Illinois Observatory used an early selenium cell photometer to produce the first-ever photoelectric study of a variable star. The light curve revealed the second minimum and the reflection effect between the two stars.[23]
A variable star? I assume it's one of the Algols otherwise I fail to see the relevance, but which?
:Some difficulties in explaining the observed spectroscopic features led to the conjecture that a third star may be present in the system; four decades later this conjecture was found to be correct.[24]
So which binary was found to actually be which two stars?
:Image: Algol Aa2 orbits Algol Aa1
Maybe it'd be friendly to mention something like ‘the closest two’ because I found myself having to search through the article again at this point. By the way, why is the darker one flubbering so much? Bad optics? Is it a flubbery star? Or is it really a binary itself?
Also the old names are still occasionally found and I think it would improve searchability if the article would at least include the full old names even if it is only to mention what their new names are.
:Yes, it is all very confusing and likely to remain so.  Different sources treat the components as either spectroscopic or resolved and hence refer to them with different designations.  We should perhaps start out with a clear description of the system and then start explaining multiple designations once the reader is clear about how many starts are where.  "Flubber"?  Lithopsian (talk) 16:57, 13 April 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Too confusing 

message: So in the Spectral Type part of the third third star in the info box, it says A7m. I naively expect a roman numeral, I, II, III, IV, V, or VI to follow the 7, but I get an m instead, which is not a roman numeral. What happened to the roman numeral? What is the m if it is not a luminosity class? Rwflammang (talk) 03:42, 3 November 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: The m is not a luminosity class, it is a spectral peculiarity (see the table in stellar classification), specifically an indication of an Am star.  I found the article deficient in actually describing the three stars involved, so I added a paragraph trying to do that.  Possibly there needs to be more up front.  The article goes off into intricate details - which is probably desirable in an article claiming to be "good" - but it fails to establish the groundwork first and so much of the detail is indecipherable.  Lithopsian (talk) 16:20, 3 November 2022 (UTC)

text: Incidentally, the star is no longer thought to be an Am star!  However, I have left a couple of asides to it being considered sp in the past.  Lithopsian (talk) 16:20, 3 November 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  A7m?