Why does the sun shine?

To read my answer to this very important question*, click here and scroll down past Noam Chomsky, Uri Geller, Bob McGrath (the longest serving human actor from Sesame Street) Steve Box (twice)--no, keep going--Elliott Goblet, The Blanks (Ted's a capella group from Scrubs), Michelle Rodriguez, Alan Fletcher, Kyle McLachlan's dog Mookie, and a picture of John Rhys Davies. Then keep scrolling, 'cos you'll also find Aaron Allston, Warwick Davis, Donatello from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Nick Earls, Peter Combe, and a whole lot more.

I never thought I'd be on the same page as Joe Dolce quoting Emanuel Swedenborg.

* TMBG fans will appreciate the difficulty I had not answering "The sun is a mass of incandescent gas / a gigantic nuclear furnace / where Hydrogen is built into Helium / at a temperature of millions of degrees" etc.

I started off the day reading this interesting article about the discovery of "carbon stars"--ancient white dwarfs with atmospheres almost entirely composed of carbon. They're rare, and they challenge our understanding of stellar evolution, and they're bound to end up in a space opera novel before long.

"The great mystery is why these carbon-atmosphere stars are found only between about 18,000 degrees and 23,000 degrees Kelvin. 'These stars are too hot to be explained by the standard convective dredge-up scenario, so there must be another explanation,' Dufour said."

The explanation, of course, is that they're alive.

Is it just me, or do we need to re-think our naming systems when the largest extrasolar planet found so far ends up sounding like a droid from the Star Wars prequels, or a bad Hamlet pun?

'"This planet is so unusual that at first we thought it was a false alarm - something that appeared to be a planet but wasn't," said CfA astronomer Gaspar Bakos. "But we eliminated every other possibility, so we knew we had a really weird planet."'

I think we should show superplanets a tad more respect, personally. Haven't these astronomers ever heard of Sontarans?

Ah, the joy of west-facing shores.

Amanda and I made a special trip to the Grange Jetty Kiosk last night to watch Comet McNaught follow the sun into the sea. The Kiosk is a restaurant built right on the sand dunes, a favourite of mine with great food and (usually) excellent service. We had a table overlooking the beach, upon which I promptly perched my Penguinscope before settling down to dinner. Our waiter was kind enough to raise the blinds and turn off the outside lights so we could scour the skies.

At first I thought we'd missed it in the glorious sunset (see the pic below for the view from our table, grainy because it was taken from my phone), but keen-eyed Amanda spotted it in the end, so our efforts were not for (Mc)Naught. (Sorry.) The view wasn't quite as speccy as today's APOD, what with the lack of ruins in St Vincent's Gulf and all, but it was certainly more interesting than Halley's last visit. The tail was clearly visible, and it was nice to watch a comet set. I've never done that before.

All astronomy should be conducted from fancy restaurants. That's my firm conclusion from this adventure.