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Newly Discovered Star Has an Almost Pure Oxygen Atmosphere (popularmechanics.com)
William Herkewitz, reports for Popular Mechanics: A newly discovered star is unlike any ever found. With an outermost layer of 99.9 percent pure oxygen, its atmosphere is the most oxygen-rich in the known universe. Heck, it makes Earth's meager 21 percent look downright suffocating. The strange stellar oddity is a radically new type of white dwarf star, and was discovered by a team of Brazilian astronomers led by Kepler de Souza Oliveira at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil. The star is unique in the known pool of 32,000 white dwarf stars, and is the only known star of any kind with an almost pure oxygen atmosphere. The new white dwarf has a mouthful of a name -- SDSSJ124043.01+671034.68 -- but has been nicknamed 'Dox' (pronounced Dee-Awks) by Kepler's team. The discovery was reported today in a paper in the journal Science.
No smoking on that planet...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
No worries - he'll only visit at night (cue sad trombone noise...)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
I wouldn't buy it. It is in a bad neighborhood. Neighbors regularly have supernova parties.
Apparently (and I get this from reading the article), it's not just the surface that's 99% oxygen, it's the whole star that is mainly oxygen.
Also the crazy thing is how he found it.......he had data from 300,000 stars printed out, on 300,000 pages, and just started reading through them one by one to see if there was anything interesting in the data.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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