Starship Asterisk*

It would be cool to send some probes just to see. Sure... if our civilization was stable enough to engage in projects that wouldn't return results for fifty or a hundred thousand years! There's no need to be selfish. We don't need our civilisation to be stable nor even our species to exist; all we ...

I thought V838-Mon, "The V-Monster", was far too young, hot and big to have viable planets?

They shouldn't have had time to coalesce from the fluffy cloud, yet and The V-Monster probably won't live long enough to let them.

I wonder if the material would all spiral in after that, or for some time make a RING... :?: :---[===] * Even dull, unexciting, boring, stable old Sol has a ring, and a poor excuse for a Dyson Shell. If NegsTenby ever formed one so close to its sun that it was entirely within the corona that ring w...

I find it intriguing that there seem to be a lot of these Hot Giant Worlds. Is it vaguely possible that this is an artificial situation? That they were engineered? That some sort of hot silicon or plasma-based lifeform needs to be so close to their home star that they deliberately manoeuvred so many...