Surf's Up! In a BIG Way!

 As stars go, our sun is rather average in size. The smallest stars, called red dwarf stars, can be less than one-tenth the mass of our sun. The largest stars are fifty times our sun’s mass or more. Most stars are not single, like our sun. NASA estimates that more than half of all stars have one or more partners, where two or more stars are in orbit around each other. Some astronomers calculate that as many as 85% of stars in the universe are in multiple star systems.

Sometimes stars in a double star system can orbit quite close to each other. That can cause some strange effects.

When you hear the words tides and waves, you probably picture an ocean beach, perhaps with surfers. On Earth, our tides are caused by the gravitational pull of the Moon. But our tides are rather gentle, with the ocean’s edge slowly creeping up and down the beach twice a day.

If two stars orbiting each other come close together, each can pull tides on its companion. If those stars are really large, they can pull big tides. 

Stars orbiting close together can pull large tides on each other. Credit NASA, JPL

Astronomers describe a binary system in which the two stars have elongated orbits as “heartbeat stars.” Because of their orbits, the distance between the stars can vary dramatically. When the two stars are closest, they can cause huge tidal forces on each other, which causes large, regular brightness changes in the stars, such as a heartbeat might do on an electrocardiogram.

A heartbeat star (center of each image). Credit: NASA ESA CSA I. Labbé Swinburne University Of Technology Image Processing

One such binary star was first detected in the 1990s during a project known as MACHO which stands for Massive Compact Halo Objects. The ‘smaller’ star is ten times as massive as our sun, while the larger one is 35 times as massive as our sun and 24 times wider than our sun. The tidal force between them doesn’t just create gently moving tides as on Earth. The smaller star pulls tides on the larger star so hard it creates waves 3 times taller than the diameter of our sun.

"Each crash of the star's towering tidal waves releases enough energy to disintegrate our entire planet several hundred times over," says astrophysicist Morgan MacLeod, from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who studied the binary pair. "These are really big waves." The smaller star also makes tidal waves, but, being smaller, the waves on its surface are much smaller.

The energy of these gargantuan tides causes the two stars to slowly spiral closer together. Eventually, they will crash into each other and merge into one even larger star. The star system sits in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of your Milky Way 160,000 light years away. Too bad, as that collision would be a dramatic sight if it were closer.

Surfers may be desirous of such waves, but they would need to use a lot of sunscreen. The surface temperature of such stars can easily exceed 37 million degrees.

Each month, I write an astronomy-related column piece for the Oklahoman newspaper. After it is published there, I post that same column to my blog page.

 This is reprinted with permission from the Oklahoman and www.Oklahoman.com.

Children’s Book authors/Editors I Admire – Karen Cioffi

 I have been writing for about as long as I can remember. My first writing effort spawned from some large, yellow-colored sheets of paper I found deep in one of my grandma’s many closets. I knew I had to do something with them, so I decided to write a comic book. The protagonist (although I didn’t know that word at eight years old) was a potato transformed into an intelligent being when he was accidentally dropped onto some nuclear waste (isn’t that how all superheroes are created?). I cleverly named him Otapot, an anagram of potato.

This is Otapot, as drawn by my 8-year-old self.

 

Unfortunately, I no longer have those two comic books, but I can say this for sure: I would have benefitted from a good editor.

 I had a short story accepted for my high school senior anthology, and I became hooked on writing. I wrote stories, articles, and even attempted a novel or two, but I couldn’t sell anything.

 Fast forward several decades. I met, fell in love with, and married my wife, Rocksye. She came with a three-year-old son, an introverted and shy child. I decided to write a story to help him overcome his shyness. Eventually, I submitted it to 4RV Publishing as a picture book where it was accepted and published as Why Am I Me? After all those years spent writing sci-fi short stories and never-finished novels for adults, I finally found my writing legs – writing for children.

 That first book came pretty easy. 4RV does extensive editing with their authors, but they suggested only a few changes to it. When I wrote and submitted my second book Kimmy Finds Her Key to the publisher, they assigned Karen Cioffi as my editor. Her edits and advice proved to be a major boost in my children’s writing career. I learned things from her about writing for children that my limited career in writing hadn’t taught me. And even now, after all these years of writing for children, I read her children’s writing blog, “Karen Cioffi Writing for Children” at https://karencioffiwritingforchildren. It’s a great place to start if you want to learn about writing books for children.

Karen is an attractive woman, but she prefers this picture of herself. I guess it’s from her love of writing for children.

I write picture books, so I have read all of Karen’s picture books published with 4RV Publishing (4rvpublishing.com). She has a series of books about kids who defend our environment called “The Adventures of Planet Man.” There are currently four books in the series. She also has a children’s chapter book, Walking Through Walls. She is currently working on a sequel to this book, but she spends so much writing time on her blogs that the sequel is coming along much more slowly than she’d prefer. She also has two books aimed at helping children’s book writers become better at their craft, How to Write A Children’s Fiction Book and an e-book titled How do you Plan a Children’s Story? All of her children’s books can be purchased through the 4RV bookstore (http://www.4rvpublishing.com/karen-cioffi.html) or from her children’s book web page at https://karencioffiwritingforchildren.com/karens-books/.

 Karen is also a children’s book ghostwriter, helping other children’s book writers realize their own dreams. So, as she says, she’s working on five children’s books. She is also writing two more books on writing for children and marketing your books.

 Writers are also readers. Karen reads articles, blogs, and books on marketing, self-publishing writing, and, recently, on the use of AI in writing “to keep up with what’s going on.” She didn’t specify how many, but I imagine she reads a fair number of children’s books. She laments that she hasn’t read a novel in years.

 Karen was my editor years ago, but the lessons I learned from her in making my book the best it could have stuck with me, lessons about story structure, characters, appropriate language for kids, how to get into a child’s point of view, what to put in the story, and (just as important) what isn’t needed in the story. To this day, when I talk to people who tell me they want to write a children’s book, I still repeat her writing words of wisdom. Thank you, Karen, for making me the best children’s writer I can be.