Weird Planets 7

We are about to start our whirl-wind tour of some of the remaining weird planets, but first, please pay attention to the following non-safety-related information:

Who designed the way stars and planets are named? I’ve more or less figured out how it works, but it really doesn’t give you any information about that star or planet. First, there’s some designation that I think indicates who/what ‘discovered’ the star. I recognize ‘Kepler’, which in its 2^nd stage of life is denoted as ‘K2’. But WASP? CaRoT? No Idea. Then comes a number to designate the star. And finally, a letter to designate the planet within that star’s system. The planets are lettered as they are found, so smaller planets probably have later letters than big planets, even if they are closer to that star.

Please keep your hands and legs inside this blog at all times, as I am both driver and tour guide, and we have a lot of space to cover!

The first planet we’ll visit in this 3^rd leg of our tour is PSR J1719-14 b (AKA the Sun Hugger), which is only 3,900 light-years from Earth. This is a possible member of the diamond-planet family (I told you about one of those in an earlier blog), and it races around its star in only 2.2 Earth hours, which makes it the fastest planet in the Ultra-Short-Period-Planet category. Also, it’s a pulsar planet, because its star is a pulsar.

Now, out the other window, take a peek at PSR J1719-1438-?, another pulsar planet orbiting a pulsar 4,000 light-years from Earth. Scientists think this planet was once a star, but when its companion became a pulsar, the huge gravity field stripped most of it away, leaving it with only the mass of Jupiter, and exerted pressure on what was left to make it a diamond planet.

Now around here – somewhere – we can see the PSR B1257+12 system discovered in 1992 and 1994. These pulsar planets at one time were the smallest planetary bodies known to exist outside our own solar system.

Here we’ve reached 12,400 light years from Earth to view PSR 1620-26 b (AKA Methuselah). As you might have guessed, it got its nickname by being old. Too old, some say, because it’s 13 billion years in age, almost 3 times as old as Earth! It would have formed less than 1 billion years after the Big Bang, even though it was thought there wasn’t enough material (I assume they mean heavier elements) to create a core for a planet. So, what’s it made of? I don’t know, they didn’t say. At that distance, maybe they can’t tell. So how do they know how old it is? Do you suppose they counted its wrinkles? J

Okay, you can take a little break now while I get us in another section of the universe.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/deep-space/g1265/space-oddities-8-of-the-strangest-exoplanets/

www.space.com/159-strangest-alien-planets.html

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/20-intriguing-exoplanets

Names for Pluto

If you’ve kept track of the various space trips we’ve sent machines on, you are aware that New Horizons is approaching Pluto. Of course, that was launched some 9 years ago, and some of us have trouble remembering what we had for breakfast. But I saw an article in January of this year that the New Horizons was ‘waking up,’ getting ready for the closest fly-by of Pluto ever. So I’ve kept my eyes open for updates on that.

In the meantime, I’ve discovered that Pluto has not just 1, but 5 moons! I’ve known about Charon for a long time, and it’s almost as large as Pluto. But the others are mere specks in comparison, and are named Nix, Hydra, Kerberos and Styx. I think I see a pattern in these names.

Recently, I saw an article asking people to submit and vote on names for when they start creating maps of Pluto’s and Charon’s surfaces, once New Horizons sends back photos taken close enough to show geological features. I hope they pick some good ones. I don’t want Pluto and Charon saddled with names like ‘Tom’s Mountain Range’ and ‘Smith’s Canyon’.

Again, they are looking for names for geological features. They don’t expect to find cities, villages or roads. Nor are they likely to find rivers, lakes or oceans... although I suppose there is some possibility that something may have frozen into long strings or blobs that might bear some resemblance to waterways. Mars has its ‘canals’, and now the bed of an ancient ocean. Even the moon has areas called oceans and seas, though it’s not likely any water ever sat in them.

So, do start coming up with names to propose for mountains, crevices, plateaus, craters and so on. The naming campaign is being promoted by SETI. You can propose names - and vote - at http://ourpluto.seti.org through April 7, which is only a few days away. The International Astronomical Union will decide which names will actually be used.

I wonder why there’s such a hurry to get a list generated? New Horizons’ closest approach won’t be until July of this year, the pictures won’t arrive here until after that, and then the maps will be begun. So, what would be your guess? A year from now, will that map be done and all the features named?

What a Character

There was a point in my life when I read a lot of westerns. I read so many, I began to recognize authors I liked. And then I realized I had read a number of books by one particular author who had only one main character.

Each protagonist had his own name, and the details of his existence differed (slightly) from all the other protagonists, but as far as the character of all these characters, they were the same person; taciturn, gentle, logical, intelligent, even-handed, knowledgeable, frugal, probably secretly rich, and when push came to shove, the best tracker, the best horseman, the best and fastest shot in the west. Reading about such a ‘superman’ once or twice is kind of fun. But I can’t relate to a superman protagonist, can you? I don’t want them as a solid diet; I’d rather read about people who are more like me – complex and not perfect.

I try to keep this in mind when I’m working with my characters. Luckily, all my characters have different life histories, different things they want to accomplish, different problems to overcome. I even go so far as to figure out what their birth order was. I am well aware that a youngest child and only daughter will act differently than the eldest adopted daughter or the middle, unusual daughter who didn’t fit in.

I have a lot of characters living in my mind. They move in before I start writing about them, tell me their story as I write it down, and then stick around, occasionally whispering a tidbit they ’forgot’ to tell me before. You’d think my mind would be housing a huge fight, it’s so crowded, or else a big party. Well, okay, each has happened, upon occasion. But one thing I haven’t been able to avoid is that all these characters have a little bit of me in them, so most of the time, they quietly get along.

Science Fiction Soap Opera Serial

I’ve been getting encouragement to serialize one of my stories on the internet. This is a use of the internet that I’ve been watching with interest, but uncertain if I should try my hand at it. With the encouragement I mentioned, I have decided to dive in.

In the last few years, I’ve heard of authors who wrote each installment of their serial moments before they were due to post that installment. That was part of what scared me about this process; I know perfectly well my first draft is NOT ready to be read by anybody. I expect At Least 3 rewrites before it might be suitable to be seen.

Once I realized that, I looked through what stories I had, either ‘done’ or nearly done, to decide which one I would serialize: No, those are all shorts; that’s a long short, but not long enough; this one is long enough, and done, but is currently out looking for a home. Hmmmm.

It’s surprising how few novel length works I have finished (1). I have 2 or 3 others ‘in the works’, meaning about half of the rough draft is done. And then I remembered Mac.

I have said I would probably never publish Mac. I have also said that when I work on Mac’s story, I get sucked in so deeply, I can’t get any work done on anything else. But the truth is that “Mac, Book 1” is mostly done, except for a few highly emotional scenes at the end that I simply didn’t feel capable of writing a decade ago when I last worked on it. Since then, I have roughed the first 100 pages of “Mac, Book 2” and the first 25 pages of “Mac, Book 3”. So, I know where Mac is headed, and apparently, I don’t HAVE to spend months and months at a time enmeshed in Mac’s problems.

For the last couple weeks, I have been working on preparing the story into ‘bite-sized’ sections. I have also continued to rewrite some shorts and work on another novel. It seems Mac has learned to share my attention.

So, “Mac, Book 1” will start being serialized on Tuesday, 1January2013. I am setting it up on Blogspot, and will make a Grand Announcement on New Year’s Day, so watch for it. I am trying for installments of about 1,000 to 1,200 words, and I will post one each Tuesday. If people get engrossed in Mac’s antics and don’t want to wait an entire week for the next section, I will post a price for the next section to be posted early, probably about $10. I am not proposing that 1 person must send me the full amount; the readers could use the comments section to alert each other to how much they are chipping in. As soon as I receive the payment, I will post the next section.

I think you’ll like Mac. She’s a lot of fun. Or a constant irritant. And sometimes both.

Name Confusion

Many years ago, I noticed that if a book had too many characters, I had trouble keeping track of them. If some of those characters had fairly similar names, I had no hope of keeping them apart in my head. I devised a method of avoiding that problem in my own stories.

Using that method has become so much a part of my process that I really didn’t pause to think about it any more. Until recently, when I started looking through papers I inherited from my mother about the family tree.

Have you ever looked through your family tree? I have been looking at one tree, the one that started with Jacob, born in 1800, and eventually resulted in me and my siblings, on my mother’s side. Families were pretty big back then, and apparently, the supply of names was limited. Take a look:

Jacob’s children included an Elizabeth, a Mary, a Robert, a Joseph, a John and a Charles. Yes, there were others, but I don’t have any bones with them.

Elizabeth and Mary both married a John, and their children (together) included an Elizabeth, a Mary, a Robert, a Joseph and 2 Johns. Two of Jacob’s sons married an Elizabeth, and both of those Elizabeths were the same age, and I don’t have a maiden name for either of them. So on that tree, I have 2 women designated as ‘Elizabeth ?, born 1835’. The children of these marriages include Mary, Elizabeth, Eliza, 2 Johns, Robert, Joseph, and Charles.

See what I mean about the supply of names being limited? 3 generations, and I am up to my neck in the same names, over and over again. Talk about confusion!

If I ever create a family tree for a book or series that I’m planning, … On the other hand, families do sometimes have a name or two that they pass down through the generations. My father’s name was Melvin; one of his brothers was Elvin. Not exactly the same, but close. My first husband had his grand-father’s name as his middle name; our son also had his grand-father’s name as his middle name. Not the same name, but follows a pattern.

Would my made-up family have such a pattern they follow, or a name they hand down through the generations? Maybe so. If they do, I’ll assign all the Johns and Marys nicknames that EVERYbody uses, just to avoid any name confusion.