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[MetalSlimeHunt]

First quintuple might be a bit of a misnomer, it seems to be the first absolutely confirmed quintuple since I can find claims of sextuple systems and even two for septuple systems. They're just all uncertain, I imagine due to the obscuring issues noted by the article.

[RedKing]

Also, a new vacation photo from New Horizons.

Spoiler: I ♥ PLUTO (click to show/hide)

.

Closest approach in 4d 18h and counting...

[LordBaal]

Does that... looks like a heart?

[RedKing]

Yes. Hence the spoiler pun. Pluto just wants to broadcast its wuv.

Between this and the "pyramid" on Ceres, you start to wonder if Nature (or an alien race) is fucking around with us.

[Il Palazzo]

Between this and the "pyramid" on Ceres, you start to wonder if Nature (or an alien race) is fucking around with us.

I'd say we're fucking with nature by inventing shapes she already had created. Nature must be all: 'but how did you know I had a geographic feature on some far-away rock that looks just like that? What are you trying to tell me?'

[Starver]

Neat new item: Astronomers find first quintuple star system.

It's a set of two binary pairs with a single star. If I read the diagram correctly, it's a contact binary on one side of the barycenter and then a detached binary on the other side with a single star orbiting that binary.

Gravity calculations must be hella fun in that system...

Wait until we go there (because we have to, having made a mess of Earth That Was) and terraform the many planets...

(Or perhaps the one we find in five years' time.)

[LordBaal]

Something really fucked up is happening all the way there in Pluto

[Dorsidwarf]

[/spoiler].



Confirmed

[RedKing]

Spoiler: Ahem. (click to show/hide)

[Egan_BW]

Wait so there's a copy of Half Life 3 on pluto.
We need a lander.

[mainiac]

It took nine and a half years for New Horizons to fly to pluto.  If we somehow figured out how to fly a spacecraft to pluto and back it would probably be a good twenty year long mission.  That means we could have half life three a good ten, twenty years before the earliest prediction.

[redwallzyl]

new Pluto picture

"A portrait of Pluto (right) and its moon Charon in a colorized, composite image made July 11 during the final approach of the New Horizons spacecraft. Astronomers are eager to get a much closer view of the icy world Tuesday."

[Starver]

new Pluto picture
[...]
"A portrait of Pluto (right) and its moon Charon in a colorized, composite image made July 11 during the final approach of the New Horizons spacecraft. Astronomers are eager to get a much closer view of the icy world Tuesday."

And the icy worlds are eager to get a much closer view of New Horizons, I'm sure.  Just as long as it isn't too close...

[LordBaal]

It's a real shame they didn't bother to send a probe over there. Even a crash probe would have been fun to have a closer look of pluto. A rover would have been just fucking amazing but I imagine it would be really hard to land something there considering the speed of New Horizons and the lack of aero breaking.

[Guardian G.I.]

Another recent picture of Pluto.