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Comment by Perceval | Hacker News Reader

This article presupposes that Proxima Centauri is not, in fact, made of chorizo. Whereas we have long known that the moon is made of cheese. I think Klein is floating a test balloon to gauge the public's willingness to consume the 'celestial charcuterie' theory of the heavens.

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> This article presupposes that Proxima Centauri is not, in fact, made of chorizo.

I don't think it does.

It can both be true that Proxima Centauri is made of Chorizo and that the French Scientist tweeted a picture of some Chorizo that was not Proxima Centauri.

Also, it could be made of chorizo but not sliced and facing normal to our line if sight. And where does the light that shines on Proxima Chorisii come from?

I think I heard you can have many questions answered if you happen to meet the flying spaghetti monster.

> And where does the light that shines on Proxima Chorisii come from?

Some suppose it is the faint light emitted by alien bacteria as the rotten portions are consumed and replaced by subnuclear paprika condensates.

Ahh, but you are forgetting the Spanish Highlander conjecture.

Is that related to the Connery constant?

> “According to contemporary cosmology, no object belonging to Spanish charcuterie exists anywhere but on Earth,” he said after apologising for tricking so many people.

>It can both be true that Proxima Centauri is made of Chorizo and that the French Scientist tweeted a picture of some Chorizo that was not Proxima Centauri.

Things get less clear-cut if we consider the "one electron universe" theory...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe

> clear-cut

booooo....

It would be a lot of fun if someone competent with physics explained how celestial bodies would behave if they were made of meat. That'd be a fun Youtube video imo.

I think that if there were a ball of meat the size of a star, it would collapse into an actual star, although smaller and more dense.

I would really be interested to know what Steller atomic composition most closely matches that of a sausage.

Maybe not that much smaller? The density of meat is close to 1gm/cm³, that of the sun about 1.41gm/cm³, but the sun is relatively small for a star and larger stars are less dense.

I’m neither an astrophysicist nor a food expert, but sausages have lots of carbon and contain a reasonable amount of water and thus, oxygen, so I don’t see young stars match them chemically. Maybe, some really old ones will, fairly short befor they run out of stuff to fuse.

If you limit things to a star’s atmosphere, you may have better luck (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_star)

With the pressure coming from the inside of the star from burning fuel, I think this meat-star would implode since it is just meat. Unless of course sausages under pressure emit energy. How much sausage would it take to start a thermonuclear process?

Depends. If it is proper spicy - think Balkans, Mexico or Thailand... probably less than you think.

What exactly happens would probably depend on what type of star it would turn into, give the elemental makeup of meat.

I'm assuming that pressure would cause temperatures in the middle to rise high enough to break everything down to its constituent elements, and then some sort of fusion would start, eventually breaking down the entire thing.

I bet it would be a _very_ messy process, as things explode and implode, burn and outgas. Eventually things would probably settle into a fairly unremarkable star, except with very odd proportions of various elements.

Sausage != Meat.

(Might be for chorizo but I'm from the UK)

You silly sausage...

So what your saying is that it would cook itself as it collapses and somewhere in the process there'd be a point where the sausage is perfectly toasted?

Well, the water in it would first heat and turn to steam as the Chorizo collapses in on itself, which would eventually result in a steam explosion and a Chorizo Mass Ejection. That might disrupt the cooking process a bit, but you may also get some perfectly-cooked Chorizo launched your way.

I don't think a steam explosion would be enough for a mass meat ejection. Stars regularly undergo fusion and that isn't enough for mass ejection unless it it becomes a runaway process in the case of Stellar death

The steam explosion is based off two assumptions: You're starting with cold sausage that heats up as it coalesces into the star, and that the steam gets trapped by the solid mass of sausage above it. Stars normally coalesce out of hydrogen that doesn't need to go through as drastic of a change as a sausage would when transforming into fusing plasma. My assumptions are probably at least partially incorrect because my field of expertise is really ribs and brisket.

https://what-if.xkcd.com/28/

Randall Munroe covered this in his Mole of Moles thought experiment.

"What would happen if you were to gather a mole (unit of measurement) of moles (the small furry critter) in one place?"

https://what-if.xkcd.com/4/

Looks like today is your lucky day!

https://youtu.be/ZP7K9SycELA

This was great, thanks for the share -- got a bunch of laughs out of me.

Speaking for the food producers of Earth and the Solar System, I object to calling whatever material this extra-solar planet is made of "chorizo". If some expedition were to be made to this planet and return a thousand years later with a 10,000 km long sausage (nicely preserved due to the vacuum I suppose), it should not be be able to confuse the consumers by selling it under a brand name connected with Earth sausages, regardless of how tasty it might be. That would just play right into the hands of whatever corporation was able to furnish the first expedition to leave the solar system.

> I object to calling whatever material this extra-solar planet is made of "chorizo"

Fine... we'll call it Sparkling Pork Sausage.

A branch of that theory posits that black holes are higher dimensional beings that happen to like the taste of this universe.

Also that entropy proves expiration dates are misleading; shelf life is not a cliff but a monotonically decreasing value.

Also that the universe is a U shaped cylinder.

I believe string theory deals with what happens at either end

> willingness to consume the 'celestial charcuterie' theory

After the theory, next step is an interstellar mission to literally consume the celestial charcuterie.

I've always subscribed to the theory that galaxies are actually big pans of paella. Dark matter is simply the saffron, both rare and mysterious.

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