Blah

    lost_angelwings sent me a link to this post about the way strong images of women get the life sucked out of them before rising up to join the forces of their enemy.

    Yesterday I wrote 358 words, including a scene I have been waiting to write for about four years now. It is not great, but it has been sitting in my head for a while and still makes me giggle.

    In class today we were supposed to have some books to practice covering on. I am not in favour of covering my books so it was hard to choose one to potentially ruin. In the end I went with Legends II. It came out okay and the teacher turned out to be a fan of Neil Gaiman.

    Blah. Stop here.

Comets Herald Death

    Planetquest reports on the discovery of the largest known extrasolar planet. TrES-4's mass was found to be only 0.84+/- 0.10 that of Jupiter but its radius is 1.674+/-0.094 Jupiter's. That is, well, large. It works out to ~119,680km (radius, not diameter) if I am lazy and use Wikipedia and Jupiter's equatorial radius.

    Aaaanyway, for a long while Jupiter was thought to be about as large as a non-stellar object could get because as mass is piled onto it (pretend you are an advanced alien civilisation that puts stuff on other stuff for fun), the increase in its gravitational field balances its tendency to expand, so that even brown dwarfs many times Jupiter's mass are nearly the same size. It is only when the object is sufficiently massive for fusion to occur that hydrostatic equilibrium shifts again and the object 9star, now, or young massive brown dwarf) expands to much larger size.

    Well, this is what was thought when the prevailing opinion was that all gas giants exist comfortably far from any stars, much as Jupiter does. Then we discovered the solar system is not as ordinary as we thought and a great many giant planets orbit their stars with suicidal closeness. External heat sources can do the job of internal ones in a pinch, so many of these 'hot jupiters' (yes, that is what they are being called these days, those wacky astronomers - I can imagine people in the distant future talking about jupiter this and jupiter that and not knowing where that particular technical term came from) are larger in size than our Jupiter, even though they tend to be lower in mass.

    Of course in the years since models have been developed to explain the expansion of superheated giant planets, but one of the things that make TrES-4 so interesting is that it is actually larger even than those models predict, so I am very much looking forward to finding out why.

    ...

    People like facts and figures, right? TrES-4 has a density of ~0.2g/cubic cm, roughly the same as balsa wood. It and its host star - which is more massive than Sol and thus entering its giant phase despite being about the same age* - are around 1400  light years distant and its temperature is about 1600 K. Its orbit is only about 4,500,000 km from the surface of its sun and its period is roughly three and a half days.

    Happy now? ^_^

    Love,
          Tricia Fakename

*This world, the same age as our own, is at the end of its natural lifespan. Superheated and boiling away, it will soon be swallowed up and blasted out existence by the death throes of the star which gave birth to it.