[PHOTO] UV Ceti, Toronto
Apr. 12th, 2009 11:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldEarly Thursday afternoon, I got to UV Ceti by getting off at the King TTC station.
Both of the components of the Luyten 726-8 binary star system, located roughly 8.7 light years away, are very dim red dwarfs. Luminosity in stars is proportional to their mass: A massive star like Antares is brighter than a blue-white dwarf star like Sirius, in turn brighter than our yellow dwarf Sol, in turn brighter than many others. The Luyten 726-8 stars are unremarkable red dwarfs, low-mass and exceedingly dim stars which happen to form the very large majority of stars in the galaxy, at least. Their nearest neighbour is the much more famous Sun-like star Tau Ceti.
The Luyten 726-8 stars still have some tricks hidden away, though, since like many red dwarfs they are flare stars, stars which hiccup and become brighter by entire orders of magnitude. It might not be too inaccurate to think of a flare star as being like a campfire, stably burning with the logs solidly arranged in teepee fashion, which bursts forth in a shower of sparks whenever one of those logs falls in. The more massive component of Luyten 726-8, star A, is a flare star. Star B is a much more dramatic flare star, known as UV Ceti and the prototype of flare stars. As Sol Station puts it, "UV Ceti is an extreme example of a flare star that can boost its brightness by five times in less than a minute, then fall somewhat slower back down to normal luminosity within two or three minutes before flaring suddenly again after several hours. In 1952, UV Ceti was observed flaring to 75 times its normal brightness in only 20 seconds." B is the star flaring, in red, in the graphic above.
Rear view of Andrew Posa's sculpture UV Ceti, located at 30 Wellington Street East in Toronto.
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei
Sculptor Andrew Posa chose the name UV Ceti, this Flickr photo and commentary suggests, because it was an obscure astronomical name. I'm a bit sad that I didn't photograph the message in garbled Hungarian that's apparently written inside the statue.
This statue was dedicated to one Edward Isaac Richmond, 1908-1982, "A kind man who shared his love of beauty." A quick googling turns up this 2007 article from The Globe and Mail, which reveals Edward Isaac Richmond to have been an architect of note.
Both of the components of the Luyten 726-8 binary star system, located roughly 8.7 light years away, are very dim red dwarfs. Luminosity in stars is proportional to their mass: A massive star like Antares is brighter than a blue-white dwarf star like Sirius, in turn brighter than our yellow dwarf Sol, in turn brighter than many others. The Luyten 726-8 stars are unremarkable red dwarfs, low-mass and exceedingly dim stars which happen to form the very large majority of stars in the galaxy, at least. Their nearest neighbour is the much more famous Sun-like star Tau Ceti.
The Luyten 726-8 stars still have some tricks hidden away, though, since like many red dwarfs they are flare stars, stars which hiccup and become brighter by entire orders of magnitude. It might not be too inaccurate to think of a flare star as being like a campfire, stably burning with the logs solidly arranged in teepee fashion, which bursts forth in a shower of sparks whenever one of those logs falls in. The more massive component of Luyten 726-8, star A, is a flare star. Star B is a much more dramatic flare star, known as UV Ceti and the prototype of flare stars. As Sol Station puts it, "UV Ceti is an extreme example of a flare star that can boost its brightness by five times in less than a minute, then fall somewhat slower back down to normal luminosity within two or three minutes before flaring suddenly again after several hours. In 1952, UV Ceti was observed flaring to 75 times its normal brightness in only 20 seconds." B is the star flaring, in red, in the graphic above.
Rear view of Andrew Posa's sculpture UV Ceti, located at 30 Wellington Street East in Toronto.
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei
Sculptor Andrew Posa chose the name UV Ceti, this Flickr photo and commentary suggests, because it was an obscure astronomical name. I'm a bit sad that I didn't photograph the message in garbled Hungarian that's apparently written inside the statue.
This statue was dedicated to one Edward Isaac Richmond, 1908-1982, "A kind man who shared his love of beauty." A quick googling turns up this 2007 article from The Globe and Mail, which reveals Edward Isaac Richmond to have been an architect of note.
Frank Richmond remembers the time his father, architect Edward Isaac Richmond, heard about a unique house party where guests were handed sledgehammers with their drinks and encouraged to take a few swipes at whatever struck their fancy. It was an old house, and the architect who'd purchased it was having it bulldozed the next day in order to build something new.
"My father was so upset by this because he viewed a home as almost a holy place," Mr. Richmond says. "When you demolish a building, there had to be a degree of respect."
[. . .]
The architect's own striking 1948 home, which he occupied until just before his death in 1982 at age 73 (and where son Frank lived until 1998), is right where he left it at 37 Burton Rd. And while it may have been a shocker to frill-obsessed, WASPy, postwar Toronto, his practice flourished. "That home got replicated in hundreds of different kinds of iterations [post-1948 and] for the next 15-odd years," his son confirms.
Perhaps that's because the 1931 University of Toronto graduate, one of the first Jewish architects in Toronto — if not the very first, his son suggests — had many Jewish clients eager to eliminate painful reminders of the old world, even architectural ones.
In a career that lasted a half-century, Ed Richmond worked on the old Mount Sinai hospital on Yorkville Avenue (a part of its façade is currently undergoing restoration and will be incorporated into a condo) during a short-lived partnership with Ben Kaminker in the early thirties. By the seventies, he was designing high-rise towers, including Palace Pier 1 on the Etobicoke waterfront.
