Author notes

302 - Contraband

El Cid

on March 9, 2020

I didn't realize it at the time, but the male game show contestant and our cyborg desk clerk here are wearing the exact same nipple shirt-and-bow tie combo. We'll pretend that wasn't me being lazy with wardrobe design, and that's just a popular fashion choice for men in this region!





Just thought this was neat. It's a NASA time-lapse simulation of what a red supergiant star looks like. If you were orbiting one of these monsters, it wouldn't look like a pristine glowing disc in the sky, as our sun does. It would look like a fire or a very slow explosion going on overhead. The lumpy shape is caused by the relatively low surface gravity, which makes it hard for the star to hold onto its outer layers of matter and hot gas. This loss of material creates a gigantic stellar nebula around the star, which is invisible to the naked eye because it's outshone by the star itself, but can be easily viewed with an infrared telescope.

Of course, it's not very likely you would be living around a red supergiant, as they're a short-lived stage in the death throes of very massive stars. The red supergiant phase typically only lasts a few hundred thousand years to maybe a million, and they can be very unstable, experienceing “blue loops” where they suddenly more than double in temperature and glow a blinding blue.