High energy ‘Death Stars’ may destroy planets before they form

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin have announced findings that shine some light on the kinds of stellar formations that create planetary systems. According to their measurements, protoplanetary discs — proplyds for short — in the Orion Nebula are directly impacted by whether or not they form or drift within range of one the enormous O-Type stars that exists within the nebula.

According to the team, the massive amounts of energy pouring off an O-Type star will completely destroy the protoplanetary disc surrounding a young star in short order. Images from the Hubble suggest that the tear-drop shape of many proplyds are a direct result of their proximity to high-energy stars. By observing multiple proplyds in various stages of evolution, the researchers have determined that a distance of 0.1 light years is too close. If the forming protostar is within that limit, the colossal energy and high amounts of UV radiation pouring off the larger star destroys all but a fraction of the mass required to create a single Jupiter-sized planet.

In contrast, propylds that exist outside the 0.1 light year limit retain enough mass for up to 80 Jupiter-sized planets — far more material and enough to form a stable planetary system at some point in the distant future.

The propylds in the Orion Nebula. Note the tear-drop shapes caused by massive amounts of solar energy.

To put that in some relative perspective — Pluto is 13 hours from the Sun, which means stars forming 13x farther away than that are still too close to an O-Type star to sustain their own planetary discs. In theory, these large stars are fuel for later stages of stellar formation — they eventually destabilize, explode, and the heavy metals in their cores are fuel for the formation of stars and planets millions and billions of years in the future. 
One of the keys to our ongoing search for life across the universe is a better understanding of what sorts of stars are likely to have planets in the first place. Thanks to the efforts of space telescopes like Kepler, we now know that stars with planets are relatively common, but new work like this gives us a better understanding of the process by which star systems acquire or do not acquire planets, improving our ability to search for extraterrestrial life in the future, when we launch advanced devices such as the James Webb Space Telescope.
There’s an ongoing scientific discussion over what sort of stellar nursery conditions are the most likely to lead to ideal conditions for rocky planets and by extension, possible life. This reinforces the idea that large stellar formations with super-massive stars aren’t friendly places for the formation of planets or life — the conditions are too disruptive, with too much potential for frequent (in cosmological terms) planet-sterilizing high-energy cosmic ray bursts, coronal mass ejections, or supernovae that would destroy a fragile planetary system — even as it seeded that portion of the galaxy with the long-term building blocks for rocky planets and smaller, cooler, longer-burning stars.

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Orbital computing: An amazing atomic-level tech for future computers

There seems to be no end to the claims that the data storage technology of the future has just been found. The technology to beat, drives with spin-valve heads based on the principle of giant magnetoresistance — i.e. the modern hard drive — has little to fear from most of these playground experiments we hear about from many academic labs. But that hasn’t stopped one researcher from suggesting that his new discoveries could lead to read-write speeds several thousand times faster than anything now imagined for fancy magnetics or spintronics.
The new technology — or shall we say, science — is being developed by Joshua Turner at Stanford’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. He calls the idea “orbital computing” since the bit that stores the it would be the orbits of electrons around the nucleus of an atom. The goal is to be able to probe the electron clouds of single atoms using terahertz waves of just the right size. The catch is that to generate a tight enough pulse of sufficient intensity to do this, you need an accelerator two miles long. But if you manage that, you can switch electron states 10,000 times faster than transistor states can be switched.

Within the beamline of the accelerator is a device called a monochromator which is used to select the radiation of just the right size. It operates analogously to a prism selecting light of a certain color. Another way to think of it is imagine that the atom is a nut. The accelerator generates craftsman wrenches of all sizes and you just need to select the one big enough to fit the over atom, but not so big that the atom just slides through it. The atoms Joshua uses are bits of manganese combined with oxygen inside crystal known as manganite.
In materials like these, the macroscopic properties (like conductance) are controlled mainly by electron orbits known as “d-orbitals.” The state of these d-orbitals can be readily observed with X-rays, and they can be controlled as easily as adjusting the temperature. But temperature or other gross manipulations are relatively slow ways to try to read or write data, compact bunches of T-rays does the trick much better. To make the whole concept more practical, something a bit smaller than a city block may eventually be needed, but that’s not to say that everyone needs a personal computer that writes into d-orbitals.

Futurists today like to wax philosophical about femtotechnology, much in the way that nanotechnology was discussed in decades past. It is for now just a theoretical exercise, a thought experiment into the possible rather than the practical. Femtotech would be vastly more compact, and speedy, compared to even orbital computing. It would require matter to be in a state comparable to that of a neutron star, at temperatures and pressures well beyond our experience. T-rays would not even cut it here, but rather gamma rays would be needed for processing.
Not even Joshua Turner is expecting orbital computing to be a workable technology any time soon. Most of his experiments are aimed at understanding what might be going on. He is merely looking into the crystal ball with a telescope and seeing what is even imaginable.

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Why the PC version of Titanfall is 48GB

Titanfall is finally out on the Xbox One and PC, and it’s getting a lot of good buzz. Unfortunately, PC gamers are noticing that the size of the Origin installation is a whopping 48GB. Over on the Xbox One, the installation is only about 20GB. So, why the disparity in size — is it the high-res textures? A lack of optimization? No, it’s all thanks to roughly 35GB of uncompressed audio.
Respawn Entertainment’s Richard Baker sat down with Eurogamer, and explained why PC gamers are burdened with the massive 48GB installation. Fundamentally, the decision to stick with uncompressed audio on the PC comes down to sheer processing power. The game’s minimum CPU requirement is a 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, and that simply isn’t enough horsepower to run the game and decompress audio at the same time. Baker explains that even modest quad-core machines wouldn’t have a problem decompressing the audio on the fly, but clearly the company is focused on running on as many machines as possible.
While it’s nice to see major games like Titanfall support older hardware, it’s absolutely bonkers that people with higher-quality machines have to pay the price for that. For those of us installing our games on relatively small solid state drives for performance reasons, 48GB seems completely outrageous. Hopefully, the developers will see fit to patch in a compressed/uncompressed toggle in the installation wizard in the near future. That way, PC gamers could choose between raw performance and overall disk usage.
Reportedly, the Xbox One download size of Titanfall is 16.39GB while the PC version is a whopping 21GB. Once installed, the PC version expands to over twice its original size, but the Xbox One remains relatively small. A 21GB download is much easier to swallow than 48GB, but it’s still uncomfortably large for those of us with monthly bandwidth caps.

 

This is a perfect example of how games are growing too fast for our lackluster internet connections. Akamai’s state of the internet report from Q3 2013 shows that the average connection speed in the US is a mere 9.8Mbps down. Downloading a 21GB game over an average connection will take nearly five hours to complete. The global average is only 3.6Mbps, so the less fortunate among us will need upwards of 13 hours to download the PC version of Titanfall.
If it’s faster to drive to the local GameStop and buy a disc, why even bother with digital distribution in the first place? Games are growing too fast, so it seems we’re stuck with physical media for the foreseeable future.

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