Just finished two nights chaperoning the DSC's first Galaxy Camp of the 2014 summer season. Strangely enough, I'll be right back there tonight for the second Galaxy Camp starting tonight and ending Friday. Wait, I'm not done. The DSC's second summer one night overnight camp starts Friday evening, ending Saturday morning. Have you done the math? I'll be sleeping at the DSC five nights this week! This is just like the good old days at the CMSEC. Casey is brave to start the camp season with three camps the first week. Will he still have a staff come Saturday morning? Stay tuned to find out :)
Mr. W.
Dream Flight Adventures will Present at the GLS Conference.
Join us at GLS
This week—Wednesday through Friday—Dream Flight Adventures will be presenting at the Games Learning Society conference in Madison Wisconsin. Special thanks to the Sprout Fund’s support for travel expenses to help us share about our exciting work with a national audience. Stay tuned to our blog or Twitter feed for updates as the conference progresses.
Hubble Star Explosion Video is Real
From Sploid
V838 Monocerotis—in the constellation Monoceros, 20,000 light years away from Earth—suffered a sudden outburst in 2002, catching astronomers by surprise. The variable red star got so big that it became one of the largest stars ever observed, producing 600,000 times more light that the Sun.
Scientists thought it was a nova, but then they realized they were wrong. The origin of this spectacular outbursts—which illuminated the interstellar dust around it at the speed of light—is still unknown. These are the current theories:
- An atypical nova outbursts (this is very unlikely.)
- A thermal pulse of a dying star (the new pulse illuminates the layers of star material previously ejected its previous outbursts.)
- A thermonuclear event withing a massive supergiant (in which the helium in one of the layers of the massive star ignites and starts a fusion process.)
- A mergeburst (the burst caused by the merge of two main sequence stars.)
- A planetary capture event (in which the star has swallowed one of its giant gas planets.)
The Imaginarium
