#Or rather it would be

[deep-space-netwerk]

please please please PLEASE share more on your Thoughts about gas giants!! i'd love to learn in a way that doesnt leave me baffled and half my brain leaking from my ears! you explained things so well in the psyche post and also i think things are generally more fun to learn from someone who is Excited To Share than from Published Research Papers where everything has been dried out For Professional Reasons- understandably so, mind, but i am not In The Field and dont know the terms lol

Okay it's taken me forever to get back to this but I AM SO GLAD YOU ASKED.

Like other planets, it all starts with a disk made of gas and dust orbiting an infant star, called a protoplanetary disk. Like these in the Orion Nebula, discovered by the Hubble!

To form terrestrial planets (rocky planets with relatively thin atmospheres like Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars), the gas in the protoplanetary disk coalesces to form hundreds and hundreds of rocky bodies called planetesimals, about a kilometer across. These planetesimals collide, and form dozens of protoplanets about the size of the moon. The protoplanets then collide as well, and stabilize to form the solar system as we know it today.

But, in the case of gas giants, colliding protoplanets don't form fully-finished planets. Instead, they form a core, or a seed.

We think the only thing that determines whether a planet will be terrestrial or a gas giant is simply how far away from the sun it forms - that's it. As a new sun warms its evolving solar system, it heats up the material in the protoplanetary disk. Close to the sun, the disk gets hotter, and things like water and other ices melt and evaporate into gas, making them difficult for the protoplanets to gravitationally capture. However, further away, the icy compounds stay cold enough to remain solid and coalesce along with rocky particles.

That boundary in the solar system - where ices evaporate to gas on the sunward side, and remain solid on the other - is called the "Frost Line". In our solar system, the Frost Line is right between Mars and Jupiter.

The protoplanets that form past the Frost Line turn into gas giant seeds, and are able to (kinda literally) snowball, picking up both rocky and icy material. With all that solid ice available, they grow far larger and far faster than planets in the inner solar system, and their gravity gets stronger and stronger. More gravity causes them to collect even MORE material until they're heavy enough to capture extremely lightweight elements like hydrogen and helium. Which, of course, makes them get even bigger and even heavier! Runaway growth!

But weirdly, as we study more exoplanets (planets that orbit stars other than our sun), we keep finding these huge gas giants incredibly close to their stars! Like, even closer than Mercury is to ours, which is insane. These "Hot Jupiters" break so many rules - gas giants "should" only be able to form where ice stays frozen, but here they are up close and personal with their stars, like this artist's concept!

It's possible that these planets are in the process of migrating closer to their stars, and we're managing to see them before they evaporate, but we just! Keep! Finding them!

One of my favorite parts of planetary science is how much we still have to learn. We'll think we have a pretty good idea of how things work out there, and then suddenly we'll find something that we can't explain. And there's an entire universe of weird shit - we've barely begun to scratch the surface!

[inbabylontheywept]

so once me and my wife were watching a documentary where a snake ate like a million eggs. that snake just went to fucking town on eggs. and the snake made the eggs look so good that i kept thinking about it, and thinking about it, and thinking about it, and eventually it was 11pm and i ran out of willpower and decided to eat one (1) singular raw egg just to prove to myself that the snake was surely a liar.

the snake was not a liar. texture is like, super important to me and raw eggs are very Texture so i had another one, and then another one, and then another one, and eventually i ran out of eggs.

i had like, fifteen raw eggs.

i didnt really know how to explain this momentary madness to my wife, so my Plan was to put all the eggshells into a grocey bag, and then throw that grocery bag in the dumpster, and if she never noticed that would be Excellent and if she noticed immediately i could lie and say that the eggs went bad.

except i cant lie very good, and of course with murphys law being such, i got salmonella.

so i threw up a lot and my wife asked me what poisoned me so and i tried very hard to dodge the question but i was oozing shame like oil from a room temperature cheese and eventaully i gave in and told her everything and to her enormous credit she was more flabbergasted than actually upset. she did make me promise to not eat any more raw eggs, which i have stuck to, and she gives me weird looks during nature documentaries now as if desire was the only thing keeping me from eating thousands of pounds of krill anyway i made a joke earlier about being able to eat my age in eggs and my sister in law in law made a drawing to comemorate the moment and also because it was my birthday. she's excellent. thank you 10000000% @cintailed. you should all visit her page and admire her work.

[stuckinapril]

I could get over anything as long as I have something new to be obsessed with

[hausmakes]

[elderberryjams]

Would you rather...

[pinimi]

Armand orchestrated Madeleine’s death because she so easily outcunted him. Absolutely no effort just laughed him in the face at his questions “yeah I can live and be mentally stable for eternity. what, like it’s hard?” she said skill issue if you can’t handle killing as a vampire. Every night Armand has seven different existential crisis and Madeleine sleeps soundly without a shred of guilt WHILE ALSO looking dead drop gorgeous and being funnier than everyone around her. Armand had to take her out early. He never stood a chance

[kodasea]

Son of Gondor

[deergravity]

Time travel poll but all the options are things I personally want to do

[miagkoi]

born to be a mediocre gamer forced to participate in society

[rasairui]

Idk I just have no patience for trans men/masculine people who refuse to acknowledge transmisogyny. Like. The worst experience I ever had with transphobia was when I was mistaken for a trans women. In a culinary program, I was cutting bell peppers, and one of the other students, a really big dude in a student leadership position, walks in and accusatory goes "so are you trying to be a woman, or something?" And I'm like. Well I'm trying to small dice these peppers. And I tell him I'm not a she and he says something to the effect of "Yeah I know that much." He makes some comment abt how whatever I'm doing doesn't make sense and he doesn't get it and when I tell him he doesn't have to, that he just has to respect it, he says "I don't have to do shit!" And gets real mad! Like actual threats mad! Tells me he could bash my skull in and to meet him outside for a fight and yeah it was fucking scary! The entire interaction I'm reminding myself that I'm the one currently holding a knife, if he tries anything.

Fast forward a few days later and my period is kicking my ass. Just absolutely destroying me. I'm in the dish pit, and I am visibly struggling, I'm nauseous, I'm in pain and bracing myself against walls. I'm not walking straight. And the same student leadership guy who was so aggressive with me when he thought I was transfem?

He tells me I look like I'm going to pass out. He says it's obvious I'm in pain, I shouldn't be in class, I can go sit down and if nobody can replace me he'll do the dishes himself.

Like. Do you get it yet. It's not just that he felt comfortable openly threatening me in a room full of other people when he thought I was a trans woman. It's that he did a complete 180 and was not only willing to support me, but actually pick up my slack once he knew I wasn't "that kind" of transgender. As soon as one of our classmates confirmed to him that I wasn't the wrong type of trans person I suddenly became someone who actually deserved care and compassion in his eyes. The "bigots think we're all the same and hate all of is equally" rhetoric isn't fucking true. It's just peddled to deny the privilege we have over other members of our community so it's easier to ignore how inhospitable supposedly trans-centric spaces are for TMA people.

[hinamie]

ṇ̵̛̱͌̅̃͛̔o̴̮̓̀͂́̃_̴̛̲́s̷͈̋̈́̄̋͠ị̶͔̗̐͐̐̒̕g̵̛̱̘̣̑͂ņ̴̰͔̘͇̏̒̓̇͠͝a̸̜̥̩̭͋̌ḷ̶͔̖͗͋͛͛̃͆

[cowardlycowboys]

girl who constantly feels like they're in trouble and did something wrong

[ironinkpen]

there's something so poetic about kipperlilly copperkettle—who hated one of her classmates for daring to be better than her and having a dead dad, who refused to improve herself and instead chose to be bitter and entitled, who was so obsessed with being Special and Important like she felt she deserved that she willingly worked with a rage god, betrayed her party, and killed her friend—getting killed by fucking. Hold Person. her fancy optimal build IMMEDIATELY folding in the face of riz's cleverness and experience and applied knowledge. she spends years fixated solely on racking up EXP and getting the Best Abilities, and then when she dies, she's killed not in glorious combat but by a clever, practical application of a 2nd level spell that she NEVER would have ever thought of using because she has no creativity or adventurers' spirit, cast by the same classmate she always hated with a watch his dead dad gave him.

[fabiansociety]

da2 isn't the best dragon age game *because* it's openly a tragedy, but being a tragedy forces a level of narrative coherence that the other games in the series don't have, and *that's* what makes it a better game.

okay, so. dragon age 2 runs on nested foreshadowing and a limited set of themes that almost every character and plot beat fall into: love is not enough, wealth is not enough, power is not enough, good intent is not enough. the problems you run into are structural, rather than individual, and your ability to resolve them as one person is strictly limited. the arishok is a central figure for this, because he prefigures every other tragedy and makes the game's thesis statement as clear as possible. he doesn't want to be in kirkwall, but he is compelled to remain until he gets back what was stolen. he doesn't want to lead a coup attempt, but he is compelled by qunari codes of justice to act. he does not want to die and fail his duty, but but he is compelled to by the other two impossible demands. every tragedy in kirkwall is the result of too many people with wildly different definitions of justice crammed into one place specifically designed to maximize human misery and suffering, and so you get a wonderfully nested narrative onion where each quest reinforces that idea, where there are no good options, just positions you can take — even the affinity system plays into that, where constantly gassing up your friends or constantly pushing them to change are equally correct ways to go, but ones that won't ultimately make a huge difference in their lives or characters, because no matter how much they like you, they're not under your control.

this coherence is even justified by the framing device. of *course* the moral of the game is "insisting on a dogmatic, narrow idea of justice destroys individuals and societies," it's a yarn being spun by varric the con artist to a chantry cop!

neither origins or inquisition play with that sort of narrative complexity. origins is a jaundiced hero's quest, certainly, but it's still basically a hero's quest; inquisition has a number of characters who question what you're doing and why, but the multitude of voices pulls the game in too many potential directions. DA2 was so constrained in its production that it pulled on decidedly ancient theatrical traditions, and it worked so, so well