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keyle

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?

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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