i mean, that's what a credit card is. you pay with the card and if you pay the balance before finance charges kick in, you don't pay any interest. if not, you get charged.

but every astronomer's shy friend. Statistics.

Making wild assumptions about the prevalence of 3-body star systems with the requisite properties, you could come up with fat error bars on the prevalence of this scenario as a Type Ia progenitor?

Journal article!

There was a cohort of grad students living in university housing at a small institution of higher learning in the Greater Los Angeles area in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains who stayed up that late to watch a certain TV program because they all lacked a normal social life. This television program from Canada featured members of the Toronto Second City improvisational comic troupe, and this program was shown in Los Angeles following NBC Saturday Night Live. Several of the actors went on to appear on Saturday Night Live and later in movies. It is the shared culture of those grad students, and at least one of them, who happened to be from Canada, went on to contribute scientifically to astronomy.

This program, if you can believe it, was even more out-of-the-mainstream, subversive and edgy and not ready for prime time than the Saturday Night Live of the late 1970s. Toronto was a "second city" to the Canadian cultural center of Montreal, and Canadians I have known carry a resentment that Canada is a "second country" to the U.S., and the television program, originating in a fictitious "downmarket" generic North American city named "Melonville" built heavily on those themes.

One of the sketches was called Celebrity Blow-up, which parodied the sort of TV content that could be developed at a downmarket, North American TV station, featured a pair of actors dressed in denim coveralls who spoke ungrammatically. Their guests were other comics doing character impressions of well-known Hollywood actors who were known to over-act or otherwise have a high opinion of themselves as actors and be ripe for comedic parody. Each "guest" was encouraged to "blow up" on screen, where they literally exploded, which in turn was a cheesy video special effect within the budget of a downmarket TV station originating this fictitious TV program. Lacking cultural refinement, the denim-wearing hosts would find this entertaining and yell, "he blowed-up, real good!"

Your astronomer colleagues, who just might include my Canadian friend from over 40 years ago, are excited about the prospect that a nearby recurrent nova would "blowed-up, real good!", which is as realistic as an overacting Hollywood actor vanishing in an explosion on camera, but since you are from a time, a place and a different cohort of students in graduate school, one perhaps not reliant on watching a low-budget Canadian-import TV program as a shared cultural experience, the reference doesn't have any context, for which I apologize sincerely.

the perfect container for soup

to Slashdot.

Do you think someone could post lots of garbage code on the internet, the AI bot would Hoover it up to train its model, and then the AI would emit garbage?

To quote the SCTV parody sketch Celebrity Blowup where celibrities known to over-act would literally explode in front of a TV audience, are you saying T Coronae Borealis could "blow up, real good!"? The literature I have seen is skeptical that ordinary novae, especially recurrent novae can retain enough mass after outbursts over time to blow up, real good in a Type Ia supernova.

First "they" say Andromeda and Milky Way will fly into each other, now "they say" they won't.

How can you plan our advanced human-minds downloaded into computing machinery civilization without reliable galaxy merger predictions?

I've studied the advanced-undergraduate textbooks on astrophysics in the Astronomy library at the U so you don' have to. Not saying that what is in those books is the last word, but it differs from the picture in more popular descriptions.

The Sun or any other long-lived lowish-mass star does not become a red giant by running out of hydrogen. It is only the core where hydrogen was fused during its Main Sequence lifetime that runs out, but there is the bulk of the hydrogen left outside the core.

What happens as hydrogen is deplete in the core is that the core shrinks, becoming both denser and hotter, igniting a high rate of hydrogen fusion in a thin shell surrounding this dense core. As the core shrinks and gets hotter, the rate of hydrogen fusion in the shell becomes more furious, the luminosity of the star greatly increases and its outer atmosphere puffs out, the photosphere, the outer surface of the star above which the stellar atmosphere is optically "thin" becomes red.

This effect is confirmed by computer simulation, but the astrophysics community doesn't offer a simple explanation as to why a star like the Sun turns into a red giant as opposed to a yellow or a blue giant. In fact, these same computer simulations show that stars somewhat more massive than the Sun can perform "blue loops", shrinking somewhat and turning bluer and then reversing course by expanding again and getting redder.

The "turning into a red giant" is not a single state, rather, a maximum size red giant for a star with the Sun's mass is a destination in a journey of getting progressively brighter, larger and redder. Astrophysicists know this but they don't communicate this succinctly is that when the Sun reaches the tip of the red giant branch, it is both a very large object from the extent of its swollen, tenuous red-giant atmosphere while at the same time it is a very small compact object at its center. At the heart of this red giant is a helium white dwarf of about half a solar mass, roughly the size of the Earth that is roughly one hundredth the diameter of the current Sun, in the electron-degeneracy density of about a million times that of water.

This hot, dense, inert core is the "anvil" against which a thin layer of hydrogen fuses at a rate reaching hundreds of times the rate it fuses in the Jupiter-sized largely hydrogen core powering the Sun over the 10 billion years of its Main Sequence lifetime. Now why radiating this gobnormous amount of energy causes the other 50 percent of the Sun's mass to swell out to just short of the current orbit of Earth, where that amount of surface radiates that amount of energy largely in the red and infrared is one of life's scientific mysteries that the answer is "because computer simulations." The hand-waving explanation is that the energy has to be transferred convectively rather than radiatively "because opacity." The sense I get about what is different about a sun-like star in the red giant phase compared to larger mass main sequence stars radiating that much power, it is generating all of this fusion power from a compact object, namely the thin hydrogen atmosphere to a helium white dwarf star at its center.

At the tip of the red giant branch when the electron-degenerate helium core reaches about half a solar mass, this situation can lead to a runaway initiation of helium fusion called the Helium Flash. This is something never observed in nature but inferred to take place, again by computer simulation and also confirmed by a maximum luminosity of sun-like stars in their red giant phase. After the Sun calms down after being told to "calm down" during its Helium Flash, the helium core both expands and starts fusing helium. The star is bluer and less luminous and not quite that much larger than the Main Sequence Sun, residing on the Horizontal Branch of the color-luminosity diagram. Because fusing helium releases much less energy per fusion than hydrogen owing to the Binding Energy Curve, the star acquires an inert carbon and oxygen core surrounding which helium starts fusing in a thin shell, pushing the stat up the Asymptotic Giant Branch making it yet larger and brighter and redder.

An Asymptotic Giant Branch is what I call a stellar Dumpster fire (my term, not in the astrophysics literature in those words). It undergoes many 1000-year long "thermal pulses" where it unstably alternates between hydrogen-shell and helium-shell fusion, as a consequence ejecting much of its mass in a "super" stellar wind and in the process ejecting microscopic carbon particles from the carbon dredged up from its inert carbon and oxygen core--actual, real-life soot, why I regard it as the stellar/thermonuclear version of a Dumpster fire. This alternatively raging and smoldering thermonuclear "fire" over time ejects a large fraction of a solar mass into what will become a short-lived "planetary nebula", illuminated in the fashion of a neon sign or a fluorescent light bulb by the ultra-violet radiation emitted by the ultra dense, ultra hot and now bare carbon-oxygen core. When the planetary nebula dissipates and the core cools down, what remains is a carbon-oxygen White Dwarf star, but it's lonesome and no longer embedded in the tenuous Asymptotic Giant star.

A white dwarf by itself is inert to further nuclear fusion until it cools and fades from view, but it has the potential to release enormous amounts of thermonuclear energy. The hydrogen impinging on the helium-dwarf core of the Sun as a red giant releases energy by fusing against that thermonuclear anvil at up to hundreds of times the Sun's current output. A white dwarf in a binary star system can have infall of fresh hydrogen, which can fuse explosively in an "ordinary nova" explosion or which can tip the carbon and oxygen in that white dwarf to fuse explosively in a Type Ia supernova explosion. This infall can take place if the companion star is expanding into a red giant and encroaching on the white dwarf.

There is current scientific uncertainty as to whether the Type Ia supernova can be triggered by infall of fresh hydrogen or if this fizzles into an "ordinary nova", or whether a Type 1a is the result of the merger of a pair of white dwarf stars spiralling in to each other. The reason Enquiring Minds need to know this as the scenario affects the reliability of the Type 1A supernova in distant galaxies as a "standard candle" supporting the claimed acceleration of the Big Bang expansion and whether the hypothesized Dark Energy driving this acceleration is "a thing", a common discussion by families around the breakfast table trying the grapple with the deep questions, "where do we come from, why are we here, why are we eating dry cereal instead of toast and eggs for breakfast?"

Didn't Kepler's laws and elliptical orbits make the Copernican model work?

Newton's Theory of Gravitation explains Kepler's laws, but for the measurement precision back-in-the-day, you didn't need higher-order perturbation terms to Keplerian ellipses?

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Isn't there a trope that the late stage of any app is that is can do email?

OpenSSH is the best known OpenBSD project, but they also makes pf (used in pfSense, OPNSense, etc.), OpenBGP, OpenNTPD, OpenSMTPD, OpenIKED, LibreSSL, etc.

Came for this comment.

>>and he insulted both of them (he called the female cop "sugartits") but only one of those made the news.

i remember "he called the lady cop 'sugartits'" being all over the news.