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One of the Milky Way's Fastest Stars Is an Invader From Another Galaxy (sciencemag.org)
sciencehabit writes from a report via Science Magazine: On April 25, the European Space Agency released a data set gathered by the Gaia satellite containing the motions, and much more, of 1.3 billion stars. Astronomers have immediately sifted the data for fast-moving stars. They are prized as forensic tools: When rewound, their trajectories point back to the violent events that launched them. Last week, one team reported the discovery of three white dwarfs -- the dying embers of sunlike stars -- hurtling through the galaxy at thousands of kilometers per second, perhaps flung out from supernovae explosions. Another group reported more than two dozen fast-moving stars, some apparently kicked out by our galaxy's central black hole. And a third has confirmed that a star blazing through the outskirts of the Milky Way actually hails from another galaxy altogether, the Large Magellanic Cloud. The flood of discoveries has sent astronomers racing to their telescopes to check and classify the swift objects, says Harvard University astronomer James Guillochon. The findings have been reported in the journal Science.
An Anonymous Coward burbled:
"Mission: Earth (Ten Volumes)" by L. Ron Hubbard. Amazing science fiction series.
If by "amazing" you mean "amazingly bad, to the point of being unreadable," then I wholeheartedly concur.
It's a series so staggeringly badly-written that only a Scientologist so utterly, slavishly devoted to the Cult of Elron that he (or she - after all, there are plenty of female idiots, too) not only drank his entire serving of Kool-Aid, but got down on his knees and begged for seconds.
I've been a science fiction fan since a month after I learned the alphabet, at the age of six. I've despised L. Ron Hubbard's incompetent, adolescent power fantasy version of SF since my first encounter with it at the age of seven or so, because it's all badly written (and I do mean ALL of it) - and none of it is based on a single scintilla of actual science. In place of the at-least-tangential connection with scientific knowledge that underlies the work of such Golden Age, space opera exponents as E. E. Smith, Edmund Hamilton, and Jack Williamson, Elron didn't bother with all that science-y, fact-ish stuff. Apparently that was labor he couldn't be bothered to perform - so he simply made shit up, instead.
But that's not the real reason you should avoid reading Hubbard's mindless drivel. The real reason - or, at least, the major reason - is that everything he wrote is, without exception, awkwardly-constructed, pointlessly grandiose, and just plain stupid.
Mind you, I was a mere seven years old when I reached that conclusion.
Nothing of his that I've read since has altered my opinion of his work in any way. Not his Ole' Doc Methuselah stories, not Battlefield Earth (which I forced myself to trudge through, because it was an Astroturfed NYT bestseller, and because I don't believe it is either fair or ethical to criticize a book you haven't read), not his magnum dopus, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Bullshit and Handwaving. And Mission: Earth is no exception to the rule.
It's all terrible.
If you disbelieve me; if you think somehow that nothing could even possibly be that bad, by all means, read it for yourself. Or try to, at any rate.
But do me, yourself, and the world at large a favor, if you will: don't buy any of Elron's gawdawful books. Not one. Instead, borrow a copy from your local public library. At least that way his estate - which is to say the Church of Scientology - doesn't get a single penny of your hard-earned money. Or buy a copy at a garage sale, or a Friends of the Library sale (because, once again, Scientology doesn't make a cent on sales of secondhand books). Don't even use your Amazon Prime privileges or your Kindle Unlimited account to read the ebook version for "free" (because, believe it or not, Amazon pays per-page royalties to authors when you "borrow" books).
Trust me on this. It'll make an unbeliever of you. I guarantee it ...
(Posting as AC only so as not to undo prior upmods in this thread.)
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Check out my novel ...