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[chaotic skies]

I was mostly joking, but yeah. I do know that iron in the core of a star signals the end of that stars life, and the most efficient fussion involves the elements with lower atomic numbers. We could, theoretically, do it though. You would just need....either a huge amount of power or some magical way to gain energy from the fusion of heavy metals. Easiest way of getting power I can think of is fission/fusion reactors, your choice or a hybrid, or a Dyson Sphere, although that's a very expensive option.

[TheBiggerFish]

Eh, any interesting !!SCIENCE!! going down?

[Starver]

Eh, any interesting !!SCIENCE!! going down?

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Discuss..?

[hops]

Eh, any interesting !!SCIENCE!! going down?

Not exactly science, but VR

[Egan_BW]

Yes, it's the thing of my dreams, but it's probably bloody expensive, doesn't exist near where I live, and is a little bit of a cop-out. And if it's the stuff of my dreams, I can probably get a similar experience by sleeping.

[Mephansteras]

That looks cool, but, damn, their website is useless. No where on it could I find information on Where the place is, If/When it is opening, and how much it costs.

Google informs me that it is in Salt Lake City and supposed to open sometime this Summer.

[TheDarkStar]

That looks cool, but, damn, their website is useless. No where on it could I find information on Where the place is, If/When it is opening, and how much it costs.

Google informs me that it is in Salt Lake City and supposed to open sometime this Summer.

Interesting. I'll be moving to somewhere near there this summer, so I might have an opportunity to take a look at it.

[hops]

I feel it'd be one hell of an ordeal on your neck, though.

[Max™]

I'm wondering if I'm the only one bothered by all the different sea ice observation tools failing or not being updated/put in place this year. Setting aside nonsense doom mongering, it's just interesting watching the evolution of the system each year, trying to see if I can guess how it will develop, and so forth.

This year the webcams didn't get funding to be put back on the ice around the pole, sensors used for estimating ice coverage are glitching out, and it's hard to find other people who care it seems.

Without the ability to do experiments on this scale, observation is our only recourse by which we can test predictions and models, what do we do when the observation platforms fall silent?

The missing maps on here: http://www.arctic.io/explorer/Y65/2016-04-30/4-N83.95557-E135 (click over to May, check the other products in the sidebar, try to find something later than mid-April) are a bummer.

The fact that the only cameras we have up there right now are #13 and #14: http://obuoy.datatransport.org/monitor#overview/gpstracks with all of the usual webcams stationed on the ice directly crunched and lacking funding to put up new ones this year: http://psc.apl.washington.edu/northpole/NPEO2015/NPEO2015_webcams.html is also a bummer. A friend got an email back after inquiring into the plans.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I’m sorry, but I’m afraid we are all out of luck for a North Pole webcam this year.  NPEO did not receive the proposed renewal for this year.  We hope to be able to pick the program back up for next year’s budget cycle, but we will have to see how that goes next fall.  NPEO has operated since 2000, and this is the second time this has happened.  Hopefully, we can recover from this as we did the first time, but in soft-money science, there are many demands and no guarantees.
 
I hope to be able to maintain the website at least at a minimal level.  We are very grateful for your interest and expression of support.
 
–Roger

Roger Andersen        roger@apl.washington.edu       (206) 543-1258
                       Cell  (206) 551-0460                     
Polar Science Center, Applied Physics Lab, University of Washington
1013 NE 40th, Seattle, WA  98105-6698  USA       FAX (206) 616-3142

[MetalSlimeHunt]

So a while ago the IAU held their exoplanet naming competition, which was mentioned in this thread, but never actually followed up on. Here are the results, but for posterity I'll also list them and their details here.

- Veritate ["Truth"] (Orange Giant)
 - Spe ["Hope"] (Gas Giant)

- Musica (Yellow Giant)
 - Arion (Gas Giant)

- Fafnir (Class K Star)
 - Orbitar (Gas Giant)

- Chalawan (Yellow Dwarf)
 - Taphao Thong (Gas Giant)
 - Taphao Kaew (Gas Giant)

- Helvetios (Sol Analog)
 - Dimidium ["Half"] (Hot Jupiter)

- Copernicus (Yellow Dwarf, binary with an unnamed Red Dwarf)
 - Galileo (Gas Giant)
 - Brahe (Gas Giant)
 - Lipperhey (Gas Giant)
 - Janssen (Super-Earth)
 - Harriot (Gas Giant)

- Amateru (Gas Giant, orbits Epsilon Tauri)

- Hypatia (Gas Giant, orbits Iota Draconis)

- Ran (Sol Analog)
 - Ægir (Gas Giant)

- Tadmor (Gas Giant, orbits Gamma Cephei A)

- Dagon (Unknown, orbits Fomalhaut)

- Tonatiuh (Yellow Giant)
 - Meztli (Gas Giant)

- Ogma (Yellow Subgiant)
 - Smertrios (Gas Giant)

- Intercrus ["Between The Legs"] (K Type Star)
 - Arkas (Gas Giant)

- Cervantes (Sol Analog)
 - Quijote (Gas Giant)
 - Dulcinea (Super-Earth)
 - Rocinante (Gas Giant)
 - Sancho (Gas Giant)

- Thestias (Gas Giant, orbits Pollux)

- Lich (Pulsar)
 - Draugr (Terrestrial)
 - Poltergeist (Super-Earth)
 - Phobetor (Super-Earth)

- Titawin (Yellow-White Dwarf, binary with an unnamed Red Dwarf)
 - Saffar (Gas Giant)
 - Samh (Gas Giant)
 - Majriti (Gas Giant)

- Libertas ["Liberty"] (Red Giant)
 - Fortitudo ["Fortitude"] (Gas Giant)

So I think it's fairly obvious that Lich wins, blowing away all competition by virtue of being what is essentially an undead star to begin with.

[Starver]

I was quite taken with Cervantes and its orbitals, I must say.

("Orbitar" looks a bit proto-"Planety McPlanetface", doesn't it?  )

[Putnam]

We named the first non-Sol star with planets discovered around it Lich?

[Starver]

We named the first non-Sol star with planets discovered around it Lich?

We named it that.   I'm sure the inhabitants of that system have a much nicer name for it*.

And I, for one, welcome our new Lichean overlords and their nicer-sounding (even if chitinously unpronouncable) name.


* -  probably translates to "The Sun", actually.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

("Orbitar" looks a bit proto-"Planety McPlanetface", doesn't it?  )

It's interesting, because apparently it's a contrived name in reference to NASA's orbital operations. I don't quite get why that ended up being "Orbitar" as opposed to "Orbiter" or "Orbita", but there you have it.

We named the first non-Sol star with planets discovered around it Lich?

The first discovered exoplanet is actually a position of some controversy, since early methods for exoplanet detection where highly unreliable and may or may not have found certain planets decades before their real confirmations, while others assert that only reliable imaging counts as discovery.

However, what I can tell you is that Draugr is the smallest planet we know of, including all the planets in the solar system.

Also, what would you have called it? I'd rather we not get into the habit of scoffing at celestial naming activities, since we are going to have to name billions of entities, and that's if we limit ourselves to the ones we pay attention to and not literally everything we can see. Lich is a perfectly fine name for this system.

[Putnam]

I'm not scoffing. I thought it was hilarious until I realized that, being a pulsar solar system, the whole thing's basically undead, at which point it was just awesome.