#January2013

French ISP ‘ORANGE’ charging Google to send traffic over its network.

Ain’t this a bitch! That French ISP is charging Google to send traffic over its network. Ain’t that a tart blast of citrus to the eyes? Oh man. I don’t know. I really wanted to work in some sort of metaphor there, after promising myself I wouldn’t run on some socialism schtick. Eh. Whatever. Read the fucking post. If you want.

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SATURN’S SIZE will make you feel like the mite you are. Relativity ++

Our fat brains can’t really process things. Consider Saturn’s sheer enormity in comparison to us. Then try and comprehend how small in relation to the sun. Then appreciate how fucking small the Sun is in the grand scheme. Nosebleed incoming!

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Sun Gets Diameter Envy; Astronomers Find Star 300 Times As Massive

[click to enlarge]

Our brains aren’t built to comprehend this shit, but let’s try. You can fit one million Earths inside the sun. And yet? A recently discovered star is 300 times more massive than the sun.

via io9:

Astronomers have identified the most massive stars known. These objects are millions of times brighter than our Sun and the largest of them all is a whoppin’ 300 times the mass of our favorite star.

The stars were discovered in two clusters–NGC 3603 and RMC 136a–and researchers used a “combination of instruments on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, in addition to archival data from the Hubble Space Telescope, to study the stellar nurseries.” With this combination of tools, they were able to discover some almost scary details about R136a1, the most massive of the stars:

Its current mass is approximately 265 solar masses, and its estimated birth weight was as much as 320 times that of our sun. R136a1 also has the highest luminosity of any star found to date — nearly 10 million times greater than the sun.

Good lord. I can’t even begin to imagine that shit. This thing needs a way cooler name than R136a1, though.