Month: September 2020

Enlarge / Disney's new key art for The Mandalorian season two. (credit: The Walt Disney Company)

Disney took to its Disney+ and The Mandalorian Twitter accounts this morning to announce the premiere date for the second season of the live-action Star Wars TV series: October 30.

The show was a huge part of Disney+'s early success in driving subscriptions, as it gained a large following, a lot of buzz, and generally positive critical response. However, when or if a second season would be coming was not clear, given the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The previous season ended its run on December 27 of last year. The final episode of season one resolved most of that season's story arcs but laid the groundwork for a new story for season two. That said, it's not yet clear exactly what form the new season will take.

Enlarge (credit: Jae Young Ju/Getty Images)

On Tuesday, Ars took a look at how Houston handles hurricanes, particularly in light of the city's botched response to Hurricane Rita in 2005. Back then, millions of Houstonians poured onto the roads to escape the storm's grasp only to find impenetrable traffic. Senior Technology Editor Lee Hutchinson was one of them, describing a "stupid fucking shambolic evacuation" that crept along at an average of 6.7mph (10.8km/h) for nearly an entire day and night in brutal Texan heat and humidity. Many just ran out of fuel on the road, a consequence of idling bumper to bumper for hours and hours with the AC running.

In the comments, a reader asked a question that provoked a long discussion in the Ars office that morning—what does this mean for electric vehicles?

Don’t sweat it

As it happens, sitting in stationary or walking-pace traffic for 20 hours is the kind of thing at which an EV excels. Unlike a car with an idling engine, an EV's battery only has to energize the electric motor when motion is actually called for. Add in regenerative braking that recovers some of that energy instead of wasting it as heat, as friction brakes do, and it's advantage EV.

The LIGO/VIRGO collaboration has picked up a gravitational wave signal from another black hole merger—and it's one for the record books.

The merger is the most massive and most distant yet detected by the collaboration, its signal traveling across the Universe for a billion years before reaching Earth. The merger also produced the most energetic signal detected thus far, showing up in the data as more of a "bang" than the usual "chirp." And the new black hole resulting from the merger is the rarest of all in terms of its intermediate mass (about 150 times as heavy as our Sun), making this the first direct observation of an intermediate-mass black hole.

"One of the great mysteries in astrophysics is how do supermassive black holes form?" said Christopher Berry of Northwestern University. "They are the million solar-mass elephants in the room. Do they grow from stellar-mass black holes, which are born when a star collapses, or are they born via an undiscovered means? Long have we searched for an intermediate-mass black hole to bridge the gap between stellar-mass and supermassive black holes. Now, we have proof that intermediate-mass black holes do exist."