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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.
WTF?
Its not like the star is for sale or anything
I presume its just an April Fool joke
Who the hell thought this "slashvertisement" thing would be funny?
Lighten up Francis.
Better yet, pop 20 Xanax and sleep the rest of your life out.
That's the Brazilian way to make science. By the way, Kepler de Souza Oliveira sounds like a very appropriate name for a Brazilian astronomer.
Linux is for people who don't mind RTFM.
Ok see ya
But the patterns aren't random. Most stars spectra will will fall into one of a handful of standard classifications, and all those should be immediately removed from the potential "interesting" set as they are only relevant for determining the standard deviation within their cluster for purposes of deciding just how strange other stars are.
If you're specifically looking for interesting compositions, you could do things like categorizing the dominant elements in a star based upon it's emission lines, and then look for anything with an abnormal composition. This isn't rocket surgery, I've got little background in data analysis, and even I can feel the shape of the software I'd need to write to find odd-composition stars, might take me an afternoon or two without using any special tools. And that's before even considering things like the the mathematical packages designed specifically to perform clustering of N-dimensional data sets.
Now granted, there's still a lot of weirdness a human might spot that I wouldn't know how to begin to program for, but an oxygen star? That should have been flagged as unusual within minutes of recording its spectrum.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.