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Spider Star
The human colony on the planet Argo has long explored and exploited the technology left behind by an extinct alien race. But then an archaeology team accidentally activates a terrible weapon...
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Praise for Star Dragon
"Seldom does a storytelling talent come along as potent and fully mature as Mike Brotherton. His complex characters take you on a voyage that is both fiercely credible and astonishingly imaginative. This is Science Fiction."
-- David Brin"Star Dragon is terrific fare, offering readers a fusion of hard science and grand adventure."
-- Locus Magazine"Star Dragon is steeped in cosmology, the physics of interstellar travel, exobiology, artificial intelligence, bioscience. Brotherton, author of many scientific articles in refereed journals, has written a dramatic, provocative, utterly convincing hard science sf novel that includes an ironic twist that fans will love."
-- Booklist starred review"Readers hungry for the thought-provoking extrapolation and rigorous technical detail of old-fashioned hard SF are sure to enjoy astronomer Brotherton's first novel."
-- Publishers Weekly"Mike Brotherton, himself a trained astrophysicist, combines the technical acuity and ingenuity of Robert Forward with the ironic, postmodern stance and style of M. John Harrison. In this, his debut novel, those twin talents unite to produce a work that is involving on any number of levels. It's just about all you could ask for in a hardcore SF adventure."
-- Paul di Fillippo, SCI-FI.COM
Blue Straggler Starlinks…
February 5th, 2009
A blue straggler is a kind of a star in cluster that stays on the main sequence longer than it should, straggling in its evolution. The truth is that such a star is probably a merged binary and evolving differently than more isolated stars.
I came across this nice introduction to black holes and quasars with a lot of follow-up FAQs answered. Black holes and quasars are the focus of my research and this is a good place to start learning if you really don’t know where to go first.
Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy writes about a new exoplanet discovered with only twice the diameter of the Earth. As cool as black holes and quasars are, there’s part of me that wishes I was working on exoplanets. It’s the dawn of a very cool age of discovery, and for me that early phase in a near field is very exciting, and more fun than later stages where work tends to more details and less fundamentals.
Jay Lake writes an insightful post about the psychotic persistance necessary to be a professional writer. It’s what being able to fly or having a way to deal with bullets is to superheroes.
I’ll likely have another post later today that isn’t just a set of links. I just hate when I have a starlinks post and then immediately see several really interesting links to add. I only like to do starlinks a few times a week. Anyway, stop your straggling here and resume your evolutionary path already!
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February 5th, 2009 at 12:30 pm
about the exoplants… Mike, some years ago I run over some articles describing some orbital telescopes which would have devices to BLOCK the light of the specific star where you want to search for exoplanets, thus, making it possible to directly visualize it.
do you have any info on such projects or ideas?
February 5th, 2009 at 12:49 pm
Yes, this type of instrument is called a coronagraph (originally designed to examine the corona of the sun). HST used one to successfully image a planet and this was big news a few months ago (I linked to it and can dig it up for you if you have trouble finding it).
So, yes, it has been done!
The Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF) is planned to employ a coronagraph and a nulling interferometer, at least in the last description I saw.
February 8th, 2009 at 2:57 pm
Wow, the Terrestrial Planet Finder has been dead since Webster Cash published his first paper on his Starshade idea. Plenty has been published on the New Worlds Mission. The complimentary science to be done while the starshade is being repositioned is better than LOTS of proposed space projects.
February 8th, 2009 at 3:17 pm
Thanks, Harold. Have a link? I might be able to google one up. I’ve seen Web give a talk on Starshade but didn’t know things had changed so much that TPF was officially dead. That’s the thing with modern, dynamic science. I did my research a few years back and didn’t bother to look for updates…hard enough to keep up with my own subfield sometimes.
February 8th, 2009 at 3:26 pm
Hmmm, ok:
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2008/02/nasas-new-world.html
It looks to me that TPF is still officially around, but unfunded, and that NWO is go as of a year ago, although the specific timeline and current status is fuzzy to me.
Definitely need to update my brain on this…