Outofambit - Out Of Ambit

Still breathing hard from what she’d been through, Dairine turned away and walked back to the house, slowly, and went into her room and shut the door. And only then did she allow herself, somewhat later, the very smallest smile.

For a star to be born, there is one thing that must happen: a gaseous nebula must collapse. So collapse. Crumble.This is not your destruction. This is your birth.

n.t. (via northwolves)

ya meme // nine quotes

the wizard’s oath (young wizards by diane duane)

This is the fourth week of Red, White and Blue Stars Month!

This week’s entry: Types of Stars

http://typeslist.com/different-types-of-stars/

Scale of Universe Measured with 1-Percent Accuracy

An ultraprecise new galaxy map is shedding light on the properties of dark energy, the mysterious force thought to be responsible for the universe’s accelerating expansion.

Image: An artist’s concept of the latest, highly accurate measurement of the universe from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey. The spheres show the current size of the “baryon acoustic oscillations” (BAOs) from the early universe, which have helped to set the distribution of galaxies that we see in the universe today. BAOs can be used as a “standard ruler” (white line) to measure the distances to all the galaxies in the universe. Credit: Zosia Rostomian, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

A team of researchers working with the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) has determined the distances to galaxies more than 6 billion light-years away to within 1 percent accuracy — an unprecedented measurement.

"There are not many things in our daily lives that we know to 1-percent accuracy," David Schlegel, a physicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the principal investigator of BOSS, said in a statement. "I now know the size of the universe better than I know the size of my house."

This took FOREVER.  Mostly cause of all the jewels.  Thankfully I had a brush for them.  It’s supposed to be the outfit described on page 184-185 (in my copy at least)of Wizard’s Holiday:

"Today the long overcoat he favored was in blue, and it was richly, even thickly, embroidered with jewels, in all shades of blue and green, some of them the size of marbles or quails eggs. Guantlets, tunic, boots, all were in metallic blues and greens, and the fillet binding his brows was of some blue metal."

Finally! A black hole that you can visit and survive!

Want a trip through a black hole without having to experience that pesky death? You’re in luck. There’s a special kind of black hole that’s not just survivable, but might get you to another time, or another universe.

Black holes are, traditionally, the scariest things in the universe. Huge, mysterious, inescapable, they wander through the universe and eat everything that gets too close. “Too close” is defined by their event horizon. This is the point at which they go dark, because it requires so much energy to escape them that not even light can get away. Since not even a photon can cross the barrier, no event that happens inside the horizon can ever have an effect on people outside.

Unless, something very odd was going on in the center of the black hole. Most black holes spin - this is something that was discovered way back in the 1960s by physicist Roy Kerr. It wasn’t exactly a shock, because most of the material that collapses into a black hole was already spinning. Sometimes, however, the spin on Kerr black holes goes a little above and beyond. Ever spun a glass of water, or soda bottle, so that the liquid inside swirls? Sometimes, if you spin it enough, the liquid actually parts, leaving a clear center and a spinning ring of water around it. The same kind of thing can happen in Kerr black holes. Instead of a singularity at the center, there’s a ring. And you can go through the open portion of that ring without touching the gravitational crush.

What’s on the other side? A lot of people have wondered. Some people think that these kind of black holes might be our key to time travel. They might be wormholes that let us hop between different points of the universe. Or they might be portals to different universes entirely. First we’ll have to find a few, and then we’ll need a few volunteers to go through. Preferably ones that haven’t seen Event Horizon.

Top Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Second Image: Dana Berry/NASA

Via NASA, Astrophysics Spectator, Discovery.

How much of YW was planned from the beginning? E.g. did you know about Bobo when you were still writing SYWTBAW?

Nope. Bobo happened along the way.

I did know from the very beginning that this was going to be a series (contrary to some people’s beliefs, especially the ones who consider the closure at the end of High Wizardry very complete). But initially I wasn’t sure where I was going with it except in very general terms. By the end of Deep Wizardry, though, I was starting to get some ideas of some things that were going to have to happen, and of how much further this could go if I got lucky and the sales were good enough to keep me at the same publisher. …But then the publisher (Dell) changed hands (managerially) and “changed directions”, as they like to say, and just after I turned in High Wizardry they started the process of offloading all their midlist authors and concentrating their attention and promotion on their bestselling writers. (In the process, for example, throwing Jane Yolen overboard. How stupid can you get?)

There has never been any overarching blueprint or master outline. But as I was working on HW I started to see the path ahead much more clearly. (Which got kind of frustrating when Dell dumped me; A Wizard Abroad wound up being published first in the UK, by Transworld / Corgi, and then by the SF Book Club, before Jane went on to wrangle the new YA imprint at Harcourt and bring me aboard). While I was working on Abroad I already knew that the events of The Wizard’s Dilemma would have to happen, and could see the difficulties that would come of them; and while I was working on Dilemma, the arc that kicks off in Holiday solidified a lot further. And so forth. This is the way it always seems to go in this series: things build and develop in three- or four-book stages, pulling in data from earlier books and making more sense of them in the overall picture.

Yet it would also be true to say that one specific issue-arc that launched in SYWTBAW has not yet paid off, has been more or less constantly on my mind since 1983, and will finally start its resolution in book 11. And whatever you’re thinking it is, I guarantee you that’s not what I have in mind. Seriously: this particular thing, no one will have seen coming. Promise.

There… that should make everybody crazy enough for one day.

Star Forming Region S106

Massive star IRS 4 is beginning to spread its wings. Born only about 100,000 years ago, material streaming out from this newborn star has formed the nebula dubbed Sharpless 2-106 Nebula (S106), pictured above. A large disk of dust and gas orbiting Infrared Source 4 (IRS 4), visible in dark red near the image center, gives the nebula an hourglass or butterfly shape. S106 gas near IRS 4 acts as an emission nebula as it emits light after being ionized, while dust far from IRS 4 reflects light from the central star and so acts as a reflection nebula. Detailed inspection of images like the above image has revealed hundreds of low-mass brown dwarf stars lurking in the nebula’s gas. S106 spans about 2 light-years and lies about 2000 light-years away toward the constellation of the Swan (Cygnus).

Fridge thought fully like, twenty years later, when thinking about the concept in Young Wizards about how a wizard is picked to be offered wizardry and given an Ordeal because they're exactly the right person for a particular problem:

So Dairine, given the power of wizardry, decides to go find Darth Vader and kick his ass, right?

And there’s like some discussion about how, if she uses her raw wizardly power to ‘go find Darth Vader’ then she’s inevitably going to end up attracting the attention of the universe’s equivalent thereof.

Which okay I always just nodded along to the logic of, big bad guy=big bad guy.

But what my brain somehow failed to conceptualize, and this may have been obvious to some other people, is what happens to Darth Vader at the end of the movies

Namely. He gets redeemed, because someone is willing to reach out and help him along towards that.

She didn’t just summon the attention of the Lone Power by trying to manifest Darth Vader into the universe by sheer ten year old stubborness, she summoned SPECIFICALLY the version of the Lone Power where Reconfiguration was a built-in possibility.