Month: June 2018

Enlarge (credit: Square-Enix)

LOS ANGELES—French game development studio Dontnod Entertainment didn't make waves with its first big triple-A release, Remember Me. It took scaling down the scope of its projects to achieve real success. That success came with critically acclaimed adventure game Life is Strange, which we at Ars liked quite a bit.

Dontnod and publisher Square-Enix announced The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit this week at E3. It's a two-hour-long, free-to-download game for PS4, Xbox One, and PC that takes place in the same universe as Life is Strange.

It's not the first Life is Strange spinoff. Last year, a multi-part prequel series called Before the Storm was released. But while that tied directly into the events of the first batch of Life is Strange episodes, Captain Spirit is more tangentially related. Still, Dontnod Executive Producer Luc Baghadoust said that there will be hints in Captain Spirit's conclusion about what to expect from Life is Strange 2.

Enlarge / The galaxy merger, with an artist's representation of a star being drawn into a black hole. (credit: Sophia Dagnello, NRAO/AUI/NSF; NASA, STScI)

The supermassive black holes at the center of mature galaxies tend to be quiet. Their activity will have blasted away most of the nearby gas and dust, and any stars that were in unstable orbits were likely to have been torn to shreds long in the past. But on occasion, the chaotic nature of complex orbital interactions should bring a star close enough to experience what's called a tidal disruption event—the star is ripped apart by the black hole's gravity.

We've done modeling of what a tidal disruption should look like, and it's clear that it ought to produce copious numbers of energetic photons. The problem is that we've not seen many events like this. Now, taking advantage of a decade of observations, researchers who recently published in Science have spotted what seems to be a black hole tearing apart a star and converting some of it into a jet of material traveling at a quarter of the speed of light. The reason we haven't seen it before? Rather than showing up at the wavelengths we expected, the event was visible in the infrared.

Merger

The story starts all the way back in 2005, when researchers identified a transient light source, meaning something that was plainly detectable hadn't been there in earlier images. The source of the signal was traced to an unusual object: Arp 299, which contains two galaxies in the process of merging.

Enlarge / Time to save the day. Again. (credit: Disney / Pixar)

The superhero film industry would be wise to look at exactly what Disney-Pixar’s Incredibles 2 has accomplished. Comic book hero sequels typically hinge on the boring formula of a hero, after riding the highs of success, succumbing to a predictable “even more powerful than me” downfall.

But this film has a particularly impressive director: Brad Bird, the animation-storytelling wunderkind behind the emotional likes of The Iron Giant, Ratatouille, and the original Incredibles. Default tropes won’t cut it.

Thus, Incredibles 2 wins by playing its established characters against each other in delightful ways, all while focusing Pixar’s special-effects portfolio on new and exciting cartoon antics.

Enlarge / We need your help to produce a new newsletter to chronicle the dynamic launch industry. (credit: Aurich Lawson/background image United Launch Alliance)

Welcome to Edition 1.04 of the Rocket Report! This collaborative effort with readers of Ars Technica seeks to diversify our coverage of the blossoming launch industry. The Rocket Report publishes as a newsletter on Thursday and on this website every Friday morning.

We welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe in the box below. Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Did a rocket launch from Washington state? Early on the morning of Sunday, June 10, a photographer in northern Washington captured a 20-second exposure of what looked just like a rocket or missile launch. But there are no known launchpads nearby. Inquiries to a nearby naval station on Whidbey Island were responded to with a simple, "It wasn't us."