Problematic stars

[More Boosters]

Hey uhh, so some stars are rather fictional as far as I can tell.

PSR J1748-2446ad in the game is depicted at 2.74 solar masses, yet the real thing has disputed mass and was measured to be at slightly less than 2 solar masses. As the most massive widely accepted pulsar is around 2 solar masses, 2.74 is quite the jump. There's a similar pulsar to this in the game with similar mass, so I'd like to see the source for giving these that mass.

Fomalhaut... I can't quite put my finger on what it is supposed to be, really. So the system is a trinary one, it has a blue star with larger mass than the sun, and then two smaller stars that don't burn nearly as hot as the one depicted in game. The in game "Fomalhaut" is sub-solar mass and it is a white star, so once again I'd like to know what it is supposed to represent.

There may or may not be more, I am not sure to be honest, but I'd like to ask, what gives with these stars?

[Dan Dixon]

Sorry we haven't replied to this yet. Our astrophysicist is taking some time off, but when she returns will definitely be able to address your question as she added the specific object in question: "PSR J1748-2446ad".

Fomalhaut may be an error on our part, but not sure off hand. She should also be able to address that.

It's on her plate to either explain or fix when she returns.

Thanks for the question.

[Jenn]

Hi.  There are a number of issues in our database for star names that are actually star systems.  The problem is that the system was set up to query the SIMBAD/VizieR database, and sometimes it grabs the wrong data when the name applies to a system instead of a star. Some of our stars are set by overrides, but some of those also seem to have been grabbed wrongly, or chosen so that our stellar neighborhood will look correct without including all members of stellar systems (I don't know the thought process of my predecessor).  I already went through and made note of the "stars" where systems are labelled as single stars in our overrides.  I got sidetracked from fixing them. Hopefully they will be fixed in an imminent update.

For Fomalhaut it seems the mass was taken from TW Piscis Austrini, while the rest of the data was appropriately grabbed from Alpha Piscis Austrini. This should be fixed in the next update.

The mass for PSR J1748-2446ad was totally a typo on my part. When I added pulsars I copy-pasted a bunch of lines into the override spreadsheet and then overwrote them mostly with the results from a query script I wrote. As the mass for PSR J1748-2446ad is not known it wasn't overwritten. I should have caught it. Thanks for the catch!

[More Boosters]

-snip-

Hi. I'd like to point out that there are some odd planets with weird compositions (e.g. 15 Mj planets with 98% iron) and some weird objects that show up when you search for the name of a star, alongside the star itself. I searched Fomalhaut for example and I got one of these artifacts. I'm assuming you know this already and that they are just waiting to be manually overridden. One such planet is 30 Ari B that is also duped as 30 Arietis B.

On the PSR J1311–3430, its current mass as I believe is disputed and considered to be erroneous. I'm not a professional (yet) and I'd like to know more on this issue. It's just unprecedented for a neutron star to have such a high mass while the ones we're sure of have a maximum of about what, 2 solar masses? 2.1? I know it seems like an insignificant thing to be talking about and it kind of is at this stage of the game but I couldn't help but ask. Is it that it's simply a placeholder or that US2 is strictly adhering to the aforementioned databases? Funnily enough it is destroyed if you turn Realistic on for it and other neutron stars don't suffer this. And neutron stars can't be manually made pulsars for some reason.