SO YOU WANT TO BE A WIZARD HEARNSSEN PUBLISHED BY PHOENIX PRESS 793.4

Started this blog because everyone needs a place to dump their space porn and YW fandom stuff....right?

Sweet…I love these.

You know how there's like some mathematician or something, who like did some useful stuff but is primarily known for overshadowing that work by going to great lengths trying to convince people to blow up the moon or something?

I wanna be like that but the hill I'm dying on is that the moon should be considered a planet

It just makes sense

What Have We Learned About Pluto?

This month (March 2016), in the journal Science, New Horizons scientists have authored the first comprehensive set of papers describing results from last summer’s Pluto system flyby. These detailed papers completely transform our view of Pluto and reveal the former “astronomer’s planet” to be a real world with diverse and active geology, exotic surface chemistry, a complex atmosphere, puzzling interaction with the sun and an intriguing system of small moons.

Here’s a breakdown of what we’ve learned about Pluto:

1. Pluto has been geologically active throughout the past 4 billion years. The age-dating of Pluto’s surface through crater counts has revealed that Pluto has been geologically active throughout the past 4 billion years. Further, the surface of Pluto’s informally-named Sputnik Planum, a massive ice plain larger than Texas, is devoid of any detectable craters and estimated to be geologically young – no more than 10 million years old.

2. Pluto’s moon Charon has been discovered to have an ancient surface. As an example, the great expanse of smooth plains on Charon is likely a vast cryovolcanic flow or flows that erupted onto Charon’s surface about 4 billion years ago. These flows are likely related to the freezing of an internal ocean that globally ruptured Charon’s crust.

3. Pluto’s surface has many types of terrain. The distribution of compositional units on Pluto’s surface – from nitrogen-rich, to methane-rich, to water-rich – has been found to be surprisingly complex, creating puzzles for understanding Pluto’s climate and geologic history. The variations in surface composition on Pluto are unprecedented elsewhere in the outer solar system.

4. Pluto’s atmosphere is colder than we thought. Pluto’s upper atmospheric temperature has been found to be much colder (by about 70 degrees Fahrenheit) than had been thought from Earth-based studies, with important implications for its atmospheric escape rate. Why the atmosphere is colder is a mystery. 

5. We know what Pluto’s atmosphere is made of. The New Horizon spacecraft made observations of sunlight passing through Pluto’s atmosphere. We see absorption features that indicate an atmosphere made up of nitrogen (like Earth’s) with methane, acetylene and ethylene as minor constituents.

6. We might have an idea for how Pluto’s haze formed. For first time, a plausible mechanism for forming Pluto’s atmospheric haze layers has been found. This mechanism involves the concentration of haze particles by atmospheric buoyancy waves, created by winds blowing over Pluto’s mountainous topography. Pluto’s haze extends hundreds of kilometers into space, and embedded within it are over 20 very thin, but far brighter, layers.

7. There isn’t much dust around Pluto. Before the flyby, there was concern that a small piece of debris (even the size of a grain of sand) could cause great damage to (or even destroy) the spacecraft. But the Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter (an instrument on the New Horizons spacecraft) only counted a single dust particle within five days of the flyby. This is similar to the density of dust particles in free space in the outer solar system – about 6 particles per cubic mile – showing that the region around Pluto is, in fact, not filled with debris.

8. Pluto’s atmosphere is smaller than we expected. The uppermost region of Pluto’s atmosphere is slowly escaping to space. The hotter the upper atmosphere, the more rapid the gasses escape. The lower the planet’s mass, the lower the gravity, and the faster the atmospheric loss. As molecules escape, they are ionized by solar ultraviolet light. Once ionized, the charged molecules are carried away by the solar wind. As more Pluto-genic material is picked up by the solar wind, the more the solar wind is slowed down and deflected around Pluto. So - the net result is a region (the interaction region), which is like a blunt cone pointed toward the sun, where the escaping ionized gasses interact with the solar wind. The cone extends to a distance about 6 Pluto radii from Pluto toward the sun, but extend behind Pluto at least 400 Pluto radii behind Pluto - like a wake behind the dwarf planet.

9. Pluto’s moons are brighter than we thought. The high albedos (reflectiveness) of Pluto’s small satellites (moons) – about 50 to 80 percent – are entirely different from the much lower reflectiveness of the small bodies in the general Kuiper Belt population, which range from about 5 to 20 percent. This difference lends further support to the idea that these moons were not captured from the general Kuiper Belt population, but instead formed by the collection of material produced in the aftermath of the giant collision that created the entire Pluto satellite system.  

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

Epic map reveals Mars’s geography in unrivalled detail

Available now for free download: "Herself"

Since tomorrow's the start of the Irish national holiday weekend with what many Irish people will refer to as The Day That's In It, this urban fantasy novella is for the next few days free for download from the Ebooks Direct store!

Set mostly in the Dublin of 2004, it contains Irish mythology, abused civic statuary, famous cemeteries, celebrated dead people, the much-mourned sushi place behind the Brown Thomas department store, seriously cranky deities, and the mysterious serial murders of numerous Fair Folk.

…By the way, though this isn't a Young Wizards work, it's set in the same universe. One scene unfolds in a space that'll be familiar to YW readers as "[the pub] where the wizards drink".

Interested?

Just head over here, shove a copy in the cart, and go through the checkout process. You won't be charged.

...And one other thing! Some of you will have seen our "Get Our Whole Store For $44!" offers, and for one reason or another haven't been able to avail yourself of them. Well, starting right now, our Tumblr folk have got another chance! (Ahead of everybody else, as the sale's not being announced to the general public on other platforms until midnight US/EST.) ...And you can even see the animated promo before everybody else! (Go on, try not to jig. I dare you.)

Details about how to get the "I Want Everything You've Got" package are over here:

Please note that if you get the Whole Store package, you won't need to download Herself separately: it's part of the package.

The usual frustrated note for our British friends: unfortunately we can't sell to you. It's a Brexit thing. Info about that is here. As always, our apologies.

And now for the jiggy bit!

Postcards from Mars

Round 1, Poll 13: Young Wizards vs Ella Enchanted

Now, I'll always be a Gail Carson Levine stan, but I have to admit that So You Want to Be a Wizard occupied a unique space in my brain for many years; thank god I'm not voting

Remember to reblog for a bigger sample size!