Tea at Trianon: Water-World Super-Earth

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, September 8, 2022

Water-World Super-Earth

From SciNews:

The TOI-1452 binary system resides about 100 light-years away in the constellation of Draco. Also known as TIC 420112589 or 2MASS J19204172+7311434, it consists of two M-dwarf (red dwarf) stars. The two stars orbit each other once every 1,400 years and are separated by a small distance — 97 AU (astronomical units), or about 2.5 times the distance between the Sun and Pluto. The newfound planet circles the primary member of the TOI-1452 system in a temperate orbit that takes 11.1 days. Named TOI-1452b, the alien world is about 1.7 times larger and 4.8 times more massive than Earth.

“The planet is located at a distance from its star where its temperature would be neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water to exist on its surface,” said Université de Montréal Ph.D. student Charles Cadieux and colleagues. (Read more.)