Newly Discovered Star Has an Almost Pure Oxygen Atmosphere

Popular Mechanics ^ | 3/31/16 | William Herkewitz

[bluejean]

“And because we had no idea anything like it could even exist, that made it all the more difficult to find.”

Sounds like something an athiest might say about God...

[Vince Ferrer]

In short, by simply being so weird, Dox completely defies our general, scientific understanding of how stars evolve and eventually form into white dwarfs. But Kepler suggests that maybe this shouldn't be all that surprising. That's because, he argues, scientists have often ignored the wacky results that can come about when stars grow and evolve while locked in a binary dance with other stars—rather than alone.

This goes against everything that I was taught in school, and that Carl Sagan taught me after school. Since it is against settled science, I recommend the astronomers be burned at the stake.

[LibWhacker]

One cubic centimeter of that atmosphere would weigh on the order of one metric ton, so if you filled your lungs with it, you’d have several thousand tons of searing hot oxygen in them. Ouch!

[Dallas59]

So...man-made Clamitety Changey may be false too...

[Cboldt]

You might enjoy this: Silicon-burning process - Wikipedia

[Boogieman]

In a star, everything combusts :)

[SJSAMPLE]

Oxygen enables combustion (rapid oxidation with a release of thermal energy).
It, in itself, does not combust.

[Verginius Rufus]

As Bugs would say, "What's up Dox?"

Kepler de Souza Oliveira's parents may have had an interest in astronomy, to name him after Kepler.

[JimSEA]

Certainly oxygen is highly reactive. Under what conditions would it exist as the only gas in the exterior of a star? What would drive off any other elements, is the white dwarf sorted by weight, atomic number, weird.

[Blood of Tyrants]

We learned the dangers of a pure oxygen atmosphere after the Apollo 7 disaster.

[Blood of Tyrants]

There has to be something to oxidize first.

[dr_lew]

( from memory )

“Once on a star in a remote corner of the universe, some clever animals invented knowledge, but then the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die. One might invent such a fable and still not sufficiently have illustrated how shadowy and flighty, how aimless and arbitrary, the human intellect appears in Nature. There have been eternities when it did not exist, and when it is gone, nothing will have happened.”

Just a cheery thought from our friend, FN .