Play the Star Formation Game!

[Bill McBlueState]

http://discovermagazine.com/2009/interactive/star-formation-game/

The associated article is pretty interesting, too:

When most people gaze up on a clear, dark night, they are struck by how many stars there are. Astronomers have an opposite reaction: They marvel at the stars’ amazing scarcity. Considering the total amount of raw material available in our galaxy for star formation, there should be up to 10 times the current count. Why, then, does the night sky not blaze with starlight?

...

Understanding how stars form and why they are so hard to make does much more than just foretell our far-off cosmic future. Star birth also explains where the atoms in our bodies come from and why the universe looks the way it does today. As astronomer John Bally of the University of Colorado puts it, “Star formation is the single most important process for determining the fate and evolution of normal matter in the universe.” Yet until recently, the details of how stars are born were literally shrouded in mystery: Stars form within dense clouds of dust and gas that block visible light.

Now astronomers are parting the veil with telescopes that detect infrared light, the kind of light central to terrestrial night-vision systems. “Seeing in infrared light is important because the diminution of visible light from inside a dusty cloud can be enormous,” says Judy Pipher, a professor of observational and experimental astronomy at the University of Rochester in New York. “This is not a problem when you use an infrared camera because at those longer wavelengths the cloud will be a million times more transparent.”

...

Efforts to spy on the star-birth process got a huge boost with NASA’s launch of the Spitzer Space Telescope in 2003. Pipher, considered by many to be the mother of infrared astronomy, worked for 20 years with collaborators William Forrest and Dan Watson to develop the detectors that form the heart of this 2,000-pound floating observatory.

...

Full article: http://discovermagazine.com/2009/feb/26-violent-mysterious-dynamics-of-star-formation

[laconicsax]

1. Fun

[Soylent Brice]

2. i just played this shit for the last 6 hrs at work.

this game is ADDICTIVE.