Wolf 359 | Hacker News Reader

Wolf 359

en.wikipedia.org

84 pointsag849 comments

To me, the most interesting fact about Wolf 359 is its low surface temperature. Wikipedia shows its surface temperature as 2800 Kelvin. Tungsten melts at 3700 K, and graphite sublimates above 4000 K. What this means is that you could make solid objects which could be in direct contact with the star and remain intact despite the temperature.

Because Wolf 359 has a surface gravity of about 320 g's, if you made a buoyant object (like a balloon), it would have a very strong restoring force. The photosphere has a very low density, so this would be basically a vacuum balloon. A vacuum balloon is much easier to make in a near vacuum than in a thick atmosphere like Earth's. If it were large enough and floated high enough, you would have the heat of the star on one side and the cold of space on the other - a perfect location for a heat engine.

I started writing a sci-fi novel a few years ago, where the conversion of Wolf 359 into an energy source powering a future human civilization was a major plot point. I chose Wolf 359 as the red dwarf because it is relatively close to Earth and has a relatively low temperature. Unfortunately, I got stuck on the dialogue for the love story plot, so I've never finished it.

Love the idea, but it’s a flare star, so make sure you plan for the occasional flare.

Maybe that means a backup heat engine in standby mode. Or if you can predict the flare, temporarily migrate out to a further orbit.

And I’d love to read your story, try to get unstuck :)

Some of my favourite sci-fi novels don’t have a love story at all. Who needs one?

I thought heat engines in space are nontrivial because it is hard to radiate off enough heat ti actually have a usable differential

320 g's? Wikipedia says 5.5 cgs which is 0.055 m/s^2 - much lower than Earth's.. I think.

That wouldn't hold any hot matter in place. It's in log g scale, which apparently is log_10 of acceleration at equator but in cm/s².

Earth gravity is about 3 log g units, while this stars 5.5 gives two decimal places (and half) more. Wolf 359 has between 100 and 1000 times stronger surface gravity than Earth.

Keep writing! Rough and messy is fine, you can come back and clean it up later.

Sounds awesome. If you need people to read for feedback, hit me up.

“In combination with a lower rate of hydrogen consumption due to its low mass, the convection will allow Wolf 359 to remain a main-sequence star for about eight trillion years.”

Awesome, and pretty competitive with white dwarfs :) .

Sometimes I need a bit of context to understand why it's on HN. I mean sure, it's a star, what makes it interesting?

Maybe due to Star Trek? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-0Jg6_zHu0

I associate it with the short story "Who's Afraid of Wolf 359?" that was a Hugo finalist in 2007.

Text: http://redstonesciencefiction.com/2011/01/wolf359/

Thanks for that, it was a terrific read.

Also immortalized in the classic Brandon Bird painting “Death of Jennifer Sisko” http://www.brandonbird.com/jen_sisko.html

lol epic. Sisko is pretty much Space Jesus after all.

When I first saw that episode as a child I didn't appreciate how close Wolf 359 is to the Solar System and therefore what a big dramatic element that added to an already dramatic battle.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DmW9SveWsAcTfsj.jpg

sleep Data... sleep...

Very underrated comment.

[1] and [2] may help :)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Best_of_Both_Worlds_(Star_...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_(Star_Trek)

I feel like Best of Both Worlds is the episode that really got TNG into it's groove. There was a lot of awkwardness in season 1 and 2, some cheesy acting and scripts, season 3 was better... But I feel like once they hit this episode and started with season 4 is when the show really took off and got good.

Alluded to elsewhere, but it's very close. After Alpha Centauri and Barnard's Star — and a couple of brown dwarfs, if you want to count those — it's next at around eight light years away. It's ended up in a lot of fiction[1], in particular Star Trek, but also a number of novels and video games (I know it from Escape Velocity: Nova).

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stars_and_planetary_systems_in...

As a chemist, the tantalising idea of the thing having non trivial chemistry on its surface, in an environment full of hard radiation, magnetic fields and a hard vacuum above it.

It's an interesting bit of science.

Stars like that are really common and very long lasting so in the long view those might be the places most likely to harbor life.

I rendered the relative size of Wolf 359 a long time ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Star-sizes.jpg

It's not much larger than Jupiter (in comparison to other stars).

Fascinating! That's actually the image from which I first learned about this star.

Is this in relation to the arXiv article "Frequency of planets orbiting M dwarfs in the Solar neighbourhood" published in June of 2019?

The quote from wikipedia.

"In June 2019 two candidate planets were reported in orbit around Wolf 359. They were detected using the radial velocity method from observations with HARPS in Chile and HIRES in Hawaii"

Wow, I never realized the site of the Battle of Wolf 359 is a real place.

There is a certain subset of star systems that I will always associate with and have a fondness for because of Freespace 2. And the phrase “Capella jump node”.

Dive! Dive! Dive! Hit your burners, pilot!

FreeSpace 2 will forever have a special place in my heart. The best space fighter sim experience there ever was.

I hear that perhaps Elite: Dangerous is comparable, but from the videos of it I've seen, it doesn't have that military sci-fi feel to it. I miss the FreeSpace ambience, where you'd fly around in your fighter listening to the chatter between capital ships as they duke it out. I'm sad there was never a third part of the series; the storyline with the Shivans was excellent.

It's not set in space, but as a fellow Freespace 2 fan... the Ace Combat series nails everything else that made Freespace 2 fun.

The AC series uses licensed real-world fighter jets but is set in a "near future" Earth-like setting. So there are sci-fi elements like giant flying aircraft carriers and enormous doomsday weapons such as giant railguns. The plots are enjoyably goofy, full of drama and plot twists. Lots of radio banter.

The overall "realism vs. fun" balance very closely approximates the good old spaceflight sims of yore like Freespace 2 and Tie Fighter.

AC7 is available on Windows as well as console, a first for the series. I put about 100 hours into it, and needless to say I really loved it. AC6 (Xbox 360) was great fun too; it may run on XBox One as well.

All AC games are all set in a shared fictional world ("Strangereal") but each game is a story about a different war and has a unique set of characters. So no worries about jumping into the series at some arbitrary random point; you're not going to be missing out on any context.

BTW, when I say "goofy"... the AC games themselves never break character. They always maintain a serious air. Think "Metal Gear Solid meets Top Gun." Gritty military stuff combined with kind of an anime-style "save the world" or "save the country" plot. The end result winds up being sort of absurd, but ultimately I think it's a really fun blend of gritty faux-realism and absurdity.

A totally serious, military-accurate mood wouldn't quite work IMHO. Because then you bump up against realities like the fact that your jets are equipped with an absurd amount of missiles, and you will end each mission having shot down dozens of enemies, literally an order of magnitude more than any living pilot has shot down in an entire career.

So, I think the AC games walk the realism/absurdity line in just the right way.

Thanks! I'm going to dust off my old joystick and try it out!

How do you get the license for real world jets?

It looks like Namco obtained licenses directly from the manufacturers. The title screen has a big, dense list of licensing information regarding the planes from Dassault, Boeing, and seemingly a million other manufacturers.

I'm not sure exactly what parts of the planes require licensing. Do you need to pay to use their names? Their likenesses? Both? Neither? Maybe it's just a courtesy? It's a good question. I'd love to know more myself.

Freespace 2 regularly goes on sale on Good old Games, and has an open source launcher/mod installer (called knossos[0]) that includes a super easy way to install tons of free community developed mod content, including re-implementations of Wing Commander 3 and a community developed Wing Commander universe based campaign. It's wonderful fun.

I also highly recommend Wing Commander Prophecy Gold [1]

[0]:https://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=94068.0 [1]:https://www.gog.com/game/wing_commander_5_prophecy

Bought it in discount recently, and it has a good/great ambience, just not amazing . Obviously a lot of detail work has gone into it, and the cockpit is pretty convincing. It misses that “this is an alive universe” touch. The scale of it is pretty good, you do get the feeling of these huge distances you traverse.

Part of what made Freespace 2 so immersive was its usage of actual stars as the locations for jump nodes - as a kid, being able to actually point to Gamma Draconis in the night sky as the setting of a game I just played added a whole new dimension to it.

For me it's the same, except for I-War (marketed as Independence War in the US). And the phrase in my case is "Toliman jump point"[1] =)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_Centauri_B

Man the graphics of I-war was really something else. Our 75MHz pentium with S3 graphics could make it look nice. Always wondered how they did that.

seems interesting, hadn't heard of I-War before: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-War_%281997_video_game%29

The game was extremely well received critically, but sadly less successful commercially. It's one of the very few space combat sims with a fully Newtonian six-degrees-of-freedom flight model. It's still extremely playable due to a togglable "fly-by-wire" system where the computer attempts to make thruster burns to keep the ship's velocity vector as close to where its bow is pointing at as possible, but a totally free flight mode is just a key press away at any time.

Another of the game's distinctive features is that instead of piloting a nimble but vulnerable space fighter, the player assumes the responsibilities of the bridge crew of a 160-meter corvette with a dry mass of almost 20 thousand tons! Even though for playability's sake the ship is capable of several-gee accelerations, there's definitely a tangible feel of inertia in how it responds to the helm controls.

The 16-minute, full-CGI intro video is probably one of the best introductions to any game ever, and definitely worth watching even as a standalone work of fiction: https://youtu.be/ECfKL4oS-6w

Same for the site of the podcast series Wolf 359!

https://www.wolf359.fm/ for those who haven't yet heard this podcast audio drama. Tone changes a bit from early episodes 1-8 or so as the story picks up, but all of it is pretty impressive.

used as a setting in many sci stories, not just st

Why?

Major Borg battle took place here. Have we forgotten already? ;)

Mr. Worf... fire!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com