White Dwarfs Polluted With Planetary Debris

White dwarfs polluted with planetary debris

The Hubble Space Telescope has found chemical evidence for the building blocks for rocky planets in an extremely unusual place: the atmospheres of two burned-out stars. Called white dwarfs, these stars are small, dim shadows of stars that would have once been like our sun, and they reside 150 light-years from Earth in the young star cluster of Hyades. Hubble’s spectroscopic observations identified silicon and low levels of carbon, both of which are strong indicators of a rocky material similar to that which makes up Earth. “When these stars were born, they built planets,” said Jay Farihi, lead author of the study, “and there’s a good chance they currently retain some of them… Based on the silicon-to-carbon ratio in our study, we can actually say that this material is basically Earth-like.” The material is thought to have ended up in the atmosphere of these stars after they collapsed into white dwarfs, and the larger planets in their solar system nudged asteroids into star-grazing orbits. The stars’ gravitational pull tore the asteroids apart, and the pulverised debris fell into a ring around the white dwarfs and were eventually funnelled inwards to pollute the stars themselves. The discovery suggests that rocky planets may commonly assemble around stars, and may help us to understand what will happen to our solar system in five billion years, when our own sun burns out.

So You Want To Be A Wizard by Diane Duane

I’m a little nervous about doing a review of this book, actually. For one thing, it’s one of the foundations of my ethical code today. Who I am is, in a large part, based on this novel and the ones that come after. That makes it a little hard to be objective and give a nice unbiased review, but I’ll do my best. Another thing I’m nervous about is that the author, who I (obviously) respect, is a regular Tumblr user, and is probably going to see this at some point. Finally,this series has a devoted fandom comprised of intelligent, wonderful people who know a lot about the series.

Still, all those reasons to be nervous should make it clear that this is a series you really shouldn’t miss!

So You Want To Be A Wizard is the first book in what is, at the moment, a nine book series. The tenth book, Games Wizards Play, is due out… sometime… Well, we know it’s coming! Recently, the series got a revamp. The first book is copyright 1992, so the timeline needed a bit of help after twenty-two years. If you’re looking to get into the series, starting with the NMEs is a good choice.

But let’s talk about the book itself.

It opens with Nita Callahan, reader extraordinaire and space devotee, running away from bullies from her middle school. She manages to duck into the library, and as she’s hiding, her finger is snagged by a book - when she pulls it out, it’s a book called So You Want To Be A Wizard. Naturally, she thinks it’s a joke, but. Well. It doesn’t read like a joke. And if she was a wizard, if she had magic, maybe she could stop getting hurt. So she takes the Wizard’s Oath, and though momentarily lulled into a sense of complacency by finding another teen wizard and learning about exciting magic things and meeting a white hole, presently finds herself engaged in a struggle against the forces of entropy, embodied in the form of the Lone Power, where the stakes are the Earth itself.

But that’s the plot. What makes this series so exceptional is the motivations of the characters, wizardly and otherwise, and the level of responsibility with which they interact with their world. In retrospect, that first scene with the bullies is pretty telling for the series as a whole. It’s seriously treated - Nita is a victim, and she is not responsible for their actions or what happens to her. She is, however, responsible for her own actions; she chooses to antagonize the bullies to claim some power from the situation. What her Ordeal (the quest when you accept the Oath) lets her realize is that she already has power - she controls her own choices, her anger and what she does with it - and it shows her how to claim it. As a wizard, she has the power to terrify those who want to hurt her; as a human, she has the power to break the cycle of violence. The very nature of wizardry in this universe demands that she choose to “guard growth and ease pain”, but it doesn’t require her to forgive the bullies. That she does choose to use her power for forgiveness shows how strong she is as a person.

Choice is in many ways the center of the book, and of the series. A species makes a Choice that defines their relationship to wizardry and entropy. Each wizard chooses to take the Oath. In the course of wizardry - and life in general - choices come up all the time. There are consequences to all of the choices you make, but what you do with your free will is in the end up to you. Figuring out what to do with your free will isn’t easy, though, and it becomes increasingly difficult as the series progresses and the characters age - the choices we make as children are always more straightforward than those we make as adults, when our ability to see the complexities of a situation grows, which is another thing I appreciate about the series. The characters are in no way static, and the books do become more difficult as the characters gain the age-appropriate abilities to handle the problems that come up.

Those problems aren’t always wizardly, either! There’s at least one very long-running romance subplot between Nita and her best friend Kit, not to mention a plethora of truly excellent sibling and parental contretemps. The familial relationships are absolutely phenomenal, by the way, and are pretty varied. Both Nita and Kit have complex, realistic, and person-specific sibling relationships. And the parents! One problem I often have with YA literature is that parents are very sketchily characterized, mostly a name and a figure to rebel against. Which makes sense - one’s perspective as a young teenager is limited, and one’s ability to see other people as people is also limited. Part of adolescence is learning to recognize that other people are distinct individuals, and in their lives, you’re on the periphery if you register at all. In this series, the parents are well-characterized from our perspective, and as the kids age, how they perceive their parents also changes. I’d like to see more of Kit’s parents - we get some of them, but not nearly so much as we get of the Callahans. There’s a good reason for that, but it’s a spoiler.

Their parents aren’t the only adult figures in these kids’ lives, either. Tom and Carl are Senior wizards who live just up the road, and provide an excellent sort of hands-off mentorship. They’re very clear from the beginning that they don’t have all the answers. The kids can ask for aid and answers, but they might not get them. I’m making a note of their care in establishing themselves as fallible early on, because the kids do forget this, and I feel like they should get some recognition for the effort. Good try, guys!

It’s an eminently quotable book, funny and heartbreaking by turns. It’s a great book to give kids - magic and mystery! Travel the universe, meet the gods! Be scared witless and thrilled breathless! Develop a strong ethical code based around the Hippocratic Oath, individual responsibility, empathy, and the strength of forgiveness, belief, and second chances! Save the world, with or without magic!

That last is actually the last thing I really want to talk about. Although it doesn’t come up much in the first series, one of the things that makes this series so very influential is the idea that you don’t actually need magic to change things. The wizards get to play in the grand scheme of things, but regular folks are no less important or influential. Sure, we can’t stop a sun from exploding, but we can slow entropy in a thousand other ways. We can conserve energy, spread order and kindness and cooperation, help the hurt, counsel the despairing, and if all that fails, we can stare evil down and refuse to go along with it because that, too, is a choice we have the capacity to make.

tl;dr - amazing book, with surprisingly nuanced discussion of ethics and excellent characterization. Purchase it for one and all! The only content warning I have for this one is bullies, though feel free to contact me if you want content warnings for the remaining books. This book is available as a multi-format package from Diane Duane’s ebookstore for $6.99. Hard copies can be purchased from Amazon for $7.19, but it’s not the NME, so be warned! You can also get the hard copy from your favorite local bookstore! If you want an ebook, I recommend getting it straight from the source. They’re excellent quality ebooks, reasonably priced, and frequently on sale as well.

White Dwarfs Polluted With Planetary Debris

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So You Want To Be A Wizard by Diane Duane