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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.
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?
Huh Too bad you can't live there... because you'd be on fire...because its a star....
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
Non Fumar!
No worries - he'll only visit at night (cue sad trombone noise...)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Something is fishy with this story:
"These observations are simple graphs about what colors of light came from each pinpoint source (called a spectral graph). Because a computer isn't easily programmed with such a vague task as "find something weird and cool," Ourique was challenged with the grunt-work task of physically looking at printed out pages of all 300,000 graphs."
Computers are very good at finding "weird and cool" things from graph data. Why would you need to look at printed out pages?
I studied physics at UFRGS and I met him a couple of times. He was also a heavy weight lifter. That's not fat in his belly. Don't know him well, though.
reason defies logic
It's a real article, as are all the others on the front page. Get your panties out of a bunch. What do need to stop doing exactly? Posting articles on April 1?
womp womp!
Lighten up Francis.
Better yet, pop 20 Xanax and sleep the rest of your life out.
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."
Get your panties out of a bunch.
Nice bit of sexism right there.
There are plenty of guys that wear silky under things.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
It was found by way of a process so grueling that its initial discoverer—one of Kepler's undergraduate students Gustavo Ourique—deserves a mention.
Ourique was looking for strange, new types of white dwarfs in a data pile of 300,000 possible observations. These observations are simple graphs about what colors of light came from each pinpoint source (called a spectral graph). Because a computer isn't easily programmed with such a vague task as "find something weird and cool," Ourique was challenged with the grunt-work task of physically looking at printed out pages of all 300,000 graphs.
I think one would be on fire while visiting that thing even if it was a planet. If not, without proper protection any human being would die.
Linux is for people who don't mind RTFM.
It doesn't matter which time zone the Slashdot editors or admins are in, or which time zone the Slashdot readers are in.
Ah, see, you missed the real prank...
Slashdot has decided to pretend its corporate HQ and the vast majority of its users operate under PDT rather than UTC.
Get it?
/ Oh, wouldja look at that, 17 o'clock, time for lunch!
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
ok. anything else?
whiplash, sometimes the best response to criticism is no response at all. Besides, bitching about April Fool's stories is every bit as much of a Slashdot tradition as the April Fool's stories themselves. It just isn't the same without them. I come just for the schadenfreude.
I'm having fun with it
I actually think the binary user numbers are cool
Snarky!
But probably not. Suns are giant balls of fusion-heated plasma, probably not much in the way of fire to be found anywhere on a significantly luminous sun. Burning (aka fire) is a chemical reaction, and suns are typically much too hot for any stable chemical bonds to exist for fire to rearrange. In fact I would guess that the plasma is so ionized that the nuclei don't even have any bonded electrons with which they could engage in any chemical reaction at all, no matter how fleeting.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
That just seems weird (the paper thing). I mean, seriously, has nobody just set loose a program to flag every observed star based on its statistical departure from the norm? I mean sure, you'd might need to go through a few iterations to get the data clustered well to spot the outliers falling between clusters, but still. That seems like the sort of thing that should be done on day one of looking for interesting things.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
You're one of those 10 kinds of people
Now that's what I like to see. I seem to recall that my very first post to you, on your very first day, was mentioning the need to say things pretty much just like that.
You can't please 'em all and it's futile to try. There is, literally, not one thing you can do that will make everyone happy. Sometimes, you just gotta tell 'em to pound sand. Which, well, you just did.
I, for one, appreciate our new realistic and mostly down-to-Earth overlords. I also second your sentiment but I do worry that we're having a bad influence on you. ;-)
"You were such a nice young man, until you started hanging around *that* crowd." Say the old ladies who amass around the village well. "Well, I'll never let MY daughter anywhere near him." Exclaims one of them, as the rest titter and nod in affirmation.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
"Kepler de Souza Oliveira"
Haha. I always appreciate the KGIII posts
Computers still aren't really good at random pattern matching, despite recent hyped performances (like alphaGo)
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Glad to see you're actually doing to Slashdot what needs to be done. So far I've liked the changes.
Thank you friend
But I thought there were 11 kinds of people?
Now I'm confused
No problem, credit due where it's deserved. I also posted a submission follow-up on that oil scandal from Wed (https://slashdot.org/submission/5731939/monaco-based-oil-company-unaoil-raided-by-police). I really like that Slashdot is the only news agency in North America that is reporting on this.
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.
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.
That's probably true......someone else said, "that's typical for Brazilian science."
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I never know whether news articles are serious or fake.
- a star with an Oxygen atmosphere could have been a dead give away but then again, public education system....
You can't handle the truth.
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.
That's kind of the way you have to look through porn.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I did some research on what humans are better at than computers, in order to develop a replacement for CAPTCHA. I found that indeed, humans, especially through our visual and auditory systems, WILL detect a pattern - even when there is no pattern. Our brain are very, very attuned to seeing patterns.
/ \ .) .)\
What I ended up using for my non-captcha was our amazing ability to instantly spot and categorize this type of pattern:
((* *|)
)_\o/_)
(
//(
I have no idea what that is but it looks like a stripper with a mouse-mask.
I'm not positive but I have a good idea that that's not what you were going for. Sorry - but I have no clue what it is that that's meant to represent.
It's okay. Don't feel bad. I can't do those MagicEye© things either. I seriously haven't got a clue what it is you're going for. It looks like a stripper (sans bra) wearing a rodent mask to me. I really, really doubt that's what you intended I, the recipient, to see.
That doesn't negate your point, of course. But yes, we humans do pattern recognition pretty well and from an early age. I think one of the AI guys that posts here on a frequent basis likened our current computer abilities to that of an 18 month old child. I, not being an expert, defer to them.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
It goes so far as when I get logged out I cannot go back to the page I was logged in on and click "reply" again, I have to go back to the main page and back into the article. Even doing that, about half the time the article comes up without me logged in.
The best I've been able to do is NEVER preview, just hit "submit", and that has about a 50% working rate.
Yes, love the changes, and love the tagging to tell me that every article on April 1 is a joke.
Yep, clicking "submit" for this one logged me out, and it took three tries to get the reload of the article to propagate my logged in status into the article itself. Cool. Now I just have to wait to get past the "you clicked reply just 30 seconds ago" that prevents me from cutting my original comments and pasting them into the reply.
Red Headed (Red Start)
Blonde (white star)
Brunette (Blackhole)
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I think they have found out that you are not, in fact, human.
There is the H-R diagram - it's a graph of luminosity vs. temperature in Kelvin
http://www.universetoday.com/5...
A white dwarf is anywhere between 1/10,000th the size of our Sun and the size of the Sun. It can also be the same temperature or five times hotter.
Astronomers do look at the electromagnetic spectrum of the star, but only certain elements show up at different temperatures:
http://www.pic2fly.com/viewima...
Oxygen only shows up at 7000K and below 3000K
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Email feedback@slashdot.org and we can get your issue solved
That you should be so lucky
Back in my day we had to crawl on hand and bare feet over glass to get to school....
Why are all user ID's and article scores in binary notation? Is there some option to change the base to decimal, octal, hexadecimal or some other language like Vai?
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
I've emailed feedback@slashdot.org and it has resulted in nothing. If anything, the problem is getting worse, not better.
> It looks like a stripper (sans bra) wearing a rodent mask to me. I really, really doubt that's what you intended I, the recipient, to see.
That's pretty it. We'll spot a potentially sexy member of the opposite gender in the dark at 200 yards. Even if the pattern of lines looks quite rodent-like, we'll spot those tits. :)
In tests, I found we're better at distinguishing a man vs a woman than we are a man vs a fire hydrant - we'll "see" a man 200-300 yards out in the dark (black and white vision) even if that "man shape" is actually a fire hydrant. We know the curves of a woman when we see them though.
Re-send it and I'll make sure it gets investigated
Because the summary is actually funny; thanks for the joke.
sigs are for losers (except to point out that sigs are for losers)
Different places different traditions.
Temperature of a white dwarf star is around 99726.85 C.
Oxygen would ignite.
While atmosphere isn't the most accurate way of describing the outer layers of a star, it seems reasonable to use it when describing the phenomena of a stars outer layers to laymen. I can't remember how deeply we went into the proper names for the various layers of stars in school, but I think it mostly consisted of descriptions of eclipses, coronas and such.
Perhaps your education didn't teach you that oxygen comes after helium and before neon in the layers of a large star, which of course leads to the possibility of the outer layers getting blown off, leaving a star with an oxygen outer layer?
A quick Google does show that most all sites describe it as an oxygen atmosphere so it's not just slashdot.
https://www.google.ca/search?q...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Is there a -1 Toady mod?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
As an astronomy minor I can appreciate the reactions that take place in the core of a star. There is likely a trace of oxygen above the core, since we do detect traces of many materials in a star spectrum but the core is where thermonuclear reactions take place, that's where you would see material conversion. Photosphere, etc., do not consist of pure oxygen. To read a story like that on the first of April does not add any certainty that this makes any sense, most likely a hoax. The story said: almost purr oxygen atmosphere. Most likely a hoax.
You can't handle the truth.
A very large star will have nuclear reactions happening through a good portion of the star, with hydrogen fusion happening near the surface, a layer below with helium fusion, another layer below that with oxygen fusion right down to the core where iron/nickel may be being synthesized.
If the outer layers are blown away (think planetary nebula), you could be left with the oxygen layer at the surface.
Anyways to a non-expert such as I am, it seems unlikely but not impossible and it is a big universe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Well, if it's not a hoax it would be unprecedented for a star, we will find out eventually if it is confirmed.
You can't handle the truth.
I'm pretty sure that's nots true. Since you're referencing the H-R diagram, I suspect you mean that it can be between 10^-5 and 10^0 of the luminosity of the Sun, but not necessarily the size (in terms of metres). Luminosity is related to the size (by a squared relationship) and the temperature (by a quartic relationship, or is it quintic?). You're OK on the temperature, which in itself gives up to a 625 (or 3125, if it's quintic) fold luminosity range. Owwww. Not wrong ... but a really, really coarse introduction to spectroscopy. There's a good reason that the basics of spectroscopy takes up a large chunk of a chapter in any decent astronomy textbook. There is a lot more to it than any one-line summary can encompass.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Owwww. Not wrong ... (etc etc.)
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
I just read the paper. And the discussion in Science. I didn't waste my time reading Popular Whatever It Was, and it looks like that was a good choice.
In TFP, the only mention of data set size is that there were 4.5 million spectra taken in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (the SDSS part of the object's name, not in the least bit mysterious), but no mention of how they selected this particular star. Almost certainly, they had grounds not described in TFP, but in TF-Supporting Online Material, but I don't have access to that. However, TFA in Science does say that they examined around 32,000 spectra (and doesn't mention their methods.
I'd check the derivation of the 300,000 print outs story before repeating it. If you've got any attachment to accuracy, that is. Personally, I don't think it's either credible - that's over 1.5 tonnes and several week's wages of paper alone. Let alone the problems of actually maintaining order over these things. 32000 printouts is pretty incredible too (but I don't make that claim).
Again, TFP doesn't say that. Specifically, they point out the presence of around one part of silicon in 3200 of oxygen, and one part of calcium in >316000 of oxygen. They suggest that this may indicate oxygen burning (16-O + 16-O --> 28-Si + 4-He) in the progenitor star and a trace of silicon burning (28-Si + 4-He + 4-He + 4-He --> 40-Ca).
What I interpret from your comment is that reading Popular Whatjumacallit leads to erroneous understanding of the subject. Is this fair?
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Cool, thx
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
It's a baboon sitting on it's haunches, facing to the left. Big cheek pouches. At each end.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
In fact, the way my non-CAPTCHA is used, we know -exactly- what the user thinks is sexy. Guess how we pull that trick off.
You are correct, the code is mostly used on porn sites (about 30,000 of them). If you've paid $29.95 to join RedheadMilf.com, we can reasonably infer that you might like red headed milfs. We use whatever photos the site itself is selling, what the customer already paid for.
If it were a free site, and it were call redhead-lolitas.com, you might see a few of those. Paying $29.95 for MILFs? Odds close to zero.
However, if such a person takes an extra two or three seconds to recognize the red headed MILFs in the pics, that's great.