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Newly Discovered Star Has an Almost Pure Oxygen Atmosphere (popularmechanics.com) 121

Posted by msmash from the in-the-galaxy-far-far-away dept.
William Herkewitz, reports for Popular Mechanics: A newly discovered star is unlike any ever found. With an outermost layer of 99.9 percent pure oxygen, its atmosphere is the most oxygen-rich in the known universe. Heck, it makes Earth's meager 21 percent look downright suffocating. The strange stellar oddity is a radically new type of white dwarf star, and was discovered by a team of Brazilian astronomers led by Kepler de Souza Oliveira at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil. The star is unique in the known pool of 32,000 white dwarf stars, and is the only known star of any kind with an almost pure oxygen atmosphere. The new white dwarf has a mouthful of a name -- SDSSJ124043.01+671034.68 -- but has been nicknamed 'Dox' (pronounced Dee-Awks) by Kepler's team. The discovery was reported today in a paper in the journal Science.
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Newly Discovered Star Has an Almost Pure Oxygen Atmosphere More

Newly Discovered Star Has an Almost Pure Oxygen Atmosphere

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  • Butts (Score:4, Funny)

    by Frosty Piss ( 770223 ) * on Friday April 01, 2016 @12:24PM (#51824297)

    No smoking on that planet...

  • Slashvertisement? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by rossdee ( 243626 )

    WTF?

    Its not like the star is for sale or anything

    I presume its just an April Fool joke

  • okay, this is totally retarded (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 01, 2016 @12:26PM (#51824303)

    Who the hell thought this "slashvertisement" thing would be funny?

    • Who the hell thought this "slashvertisement" thing would be funny?

      At least it's not as atrocious as last years abortive attempt at humor. And I use that word because it was literally as funny as an abortion. And I use that word because there was nothing figurative about it.

    • Re:okay, this is totally retarded (Score:4, Funny)

      by whipslash ( 4433507 ) Works for Slashdot on Friday April 01, 2016 @01:20PM (#51824629) Journal
      There are 10 types of people in this world, those who understand Slashvertisements, and those who don't.
    • Hey man, with all the ad blocking, the site doesn't pay for itself. Sit back and read it like a good little consumer.

    • Re:okay, this is totally retarded (Score:4)

      by samwichse ( 1056268 ) on Friday April 01, 2016 @01:59PM (#51824791)

      I imagine it's hilarious to whipslash, who seems to spend a lot of time responding sarcastically to a million comments complaining every story is a slashvertisement .
      That's pretty much the reason I found it funny. Much funnier than filling the site with bogus stories... past years I stopped even visiting Slashdot on April 1st. Making fun of everyone calling everything slashvertisements, binary user ids, binary mods? I'll put that up there with OMG Ponies as a funny window dressing while still offering actual articles.

      +1 from me.

      Sam

  • Non Fumar!
  • Something is fishy with this story:

    "These observations are simple graphs about what colors of light came from each pinpoint source (called a spectral graph). Because a computer isn't easily programmed with such a vague task as "find something weird and cool," Ourique was challenged with the grunt-work task of physically looking at printed out pages of all 300,000 graphs."

    Computers are very good at finding "weird and cool" things from graph data. Why would you need to look at printed out pages?

    • Back in my day we had to read 6 sides of printed paper after walking to school up hill both ways in the snow.

    • Agreed. We even have software specifically designed to cluster arbitrary N-dimensional data. Simplest case you feed in the N-band spectrographs of all observed stars and let it cluster away, then go looking at anything that didn't fit neatly into any of the clusters. And presumably look at the clusters themselves too, just in case there's a lot of something you didn't know existed.

      It'd probably due a crap job without a lot of refining, but would probably turn up lots of weird stuff all the same.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by KGIII ( 973947 )

      My understanding is that, actually no - they're not so good at that. We humans still excel at pattern recognition.

      Now, this is a layman's understanding (though I understand it a bit better than most laymen, I should assume) so take it at face value and with that caveat.

      But, we're just now getting to the point where computers are approaching child-like recognition. Remember the recent outrage when black people were recognized as gorillas? How they have issues with Asian eyes not being open?

      See, as a kid, we

      • Well you have zero understanding of the problem. This isn't pattern recognition, this is detecting deviations from data points. This is something that computers do very very well. You don't give the computer the image of the graph, although you could, you give it the data points. Christ.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by KGIII ( 973947 )

          Umm... You don't realize that data points, over multiple objects, are patterns? The images used were an *example* and not the totality. And you think it is *I* who doesn't understand the problem? Really? REALLY?

        • No, actually KGIII is correct. It is essentially a pattern recognition problem - intensity versus wavelength, with low frequency and high frequency components.
      • I did some research on what humans are better at than computers, in order to develop a replacement for CAPTCHA. I found that indeed, humans, especially through our visual and auditory systems, WILL detect a pattern - even when there is no pattern. Our brain are very, very attuned to seeing patterns.

        What I ended up using for my non-captcha was our amazing ability to instantly spot and categorize this type of pattern:

        ((* *|)
        )_\o/_)
        ( / \
        //( .) .)\

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by KGIII ( 973947 )

          I have no idea what that is but it looks like a stripper with a mouse-mask.

          I'm not positive but I have a good idea that that's not what you were going for. Sorry - but I have no clue what it is that that's meant to represent.

          It's okay. Don't feel bad. I can't do those MagicEye© things either. I seriously haven't got a clue what it is you're going for. It looks like a stripper (sans bra) wearing a rodent mask to me. I really, really doubt that's what you intended I, the recipient, to see.

          That doesn't ne

          • > It looks like a stripper (sans bra) wearing a rodent mask to me. I really, really doubt that's what you intended I, the recipient, to see.

            That's pretty it. We'll spot a potentially sexy member of the opposite gender in the dark at 200 yards. Even if the pattern of lines looks quite rodent-like, we'll spot those tits. :)

            In tests, I found we're better at distinguishing a man vs a woman than we are a man vs a fire hydrant - we'll "see" a man 200-300 yards out in the dark (black and white vision) even if

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by KGIII ( 973947 )

              Heh... Does it mean anything if I first thought they were eyeballs? ;-)

              When computers can do that then I think our binary friend above will have a point. They can't do that yet. I'm not the least bit surprised that it was found by a human reading bits of paper and noticing an oddity. (Oddly, if you expand their comment, they went on to assert that I had no idea what I was talking about and that the problem wasn't pattern recognition.)

            • That's pretty it. We'll spot a potentially sexy member of the opposite gender

              Define, for all your audience, "sexy." Also define, for all your audience, what the phrase "opposite gender" means.

              As far as I'm aware, most countries in the civilised world make it illegal to discriminate against people on the basis of their gender. Which is what you're doing. Congratualtions - you must be the first resident of Saudi Arabi that I've communicated with on Slashdot.

              • In fact, the way my non-CAPTCHA is used, we know -exactly- what the user thinks is sexy. Guess how we pull that trick off.

                • That would be interesting. Particularly since the subconscious is very important in what is "sexy".

                  Yo Momma ... actually, I don't need to complete the joke, because even if you considered your mother's identical twin sister to be sexy, your response to "yo momma" is likely to be different.

                  Anyway, you either code for a porn site (in which case you get people's lies-to-themselves) or for a psychology specialist site (in which case, you're well aware of these problems).

                  • You are correct, the code is mostly used on porn sites (about 30,000 of them). If you've paid $29.95 to join RedheadMilf.com, we can reasonably infer that you might like red headed milfs. We use whatever photos the site itself is selling, what the customer already paid for.

                    • "we can reasonably infer"

                      NOT EQUAL TO "we know"

                      Which is fine : good inference is a fine standard. But it is not the same as "knowledge".

                      What are the odds that RedheadMilf.com has a number of customers who are police officers and/or vigilantes masquerading as customers in order to monitor the content? 80%? 90%? 99%? (Note that these masqueraders may not be from your jurisdiction.)

                    • If it were a free site, and it were call redhead-lolitas.com, you might see a few of those. Paying $29.95 for MILFs? Odds close to zero.

                      However, if such a person takes an extra two or three seconds to recognize the red headed MILFs in the pics, that's great.

        • It's a baboon sitting on it's haunches, facing to the left. Big cheek pouches. At each end.

  • I studied physics at UFRGS and I met him a couple of times. He was also a heavy weight lifter. That's not fat in his belly. Don't know him well, though.

  • It was found by way of a process so grueling that its initial discoverer—one of Kepler's undergraduate students Gustavo Ourique—deserves a mention.

    Ourique was looking for strange, new types of white dwarfs in a data pile of 300,000 possible observations. These observations are simple graphs about what colors of light came from each pinpoint source (called a spectral graph). Because a computer isn't easily programmed with such a vague task as "find something weird and cool," Ourique was challenged with the grunt-work task of physically looking at printed out pages of all 300,000 graphs.

    • I know grad students are essentially slave labor, but you figure it would be profitable to at least try to develop a filter. Maybe use correlation and a training set to at least identify all the routine, boring spectral plots that look like each other?

  • "Kepler de Souza Oliveira"
  • Because the summary is actually funny; thanks for the joke.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

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