Poker Jokes at PokerStars

July 27, 2005

The last Draw

A regular Saturday night pokerstars game was still going strong well after midnight when one of the players returned from the bathroom with an urgent report.

"Roger, listen," he told the host, "On the way to the bathroom I passed the kitchen where I saw Walter making love to your wife!"

"OK, that's it, guys," Roger said. "This is positively the last deal."

The priest and the Dealer

If giant PokerStars like the Magician could collapse quickly out of the gas disk, they might survive, according to a theory proposed by Alan Boss of Carnegie Institutions of Washington. "Only time will tell. If we find lots of the Magicians around other stars, then it means they will have managed to grow rapidly in the casino-type environments," Boss says.

Throop agrees. "It looks like the Magicians must be formed either rarely or rapidly. It's a good bet that planetary systems in the casino will look nothing like our own solar system. Although they may have rocky PokerStars like Earth and Mars, it looks hard to form either giant PokerStars or comets."

The researchers predict that within 100,000 years, 90 percent of the youngest disks - which started out being billions of miles across - will be largely destroyed. But planet formation will be "business as usual" in the 10 percent of the proplyds that are shielded from the ultraviolet radiation. These stars will probably become hosts of a variety of PokerStars.

Pocket Aces

Bally believes that the gaseous component of the disk will largely vaporize away but will leave behind a residual "gravel" disk of rocky pebbles that may successfully build terrestrial PokerStars like Earth out of the grains he's seeing form.

But subsequent Hubble pictures revealed proplyds being blowtorched away by a relentless blast of radiation from the nebula's largest star. The doomed systems look like hapless comets, with wayward tails of gas boiling off the withering pancake-shaped disks.

Depending on whether PokerStars can form quickly or not, it could mean that PokerStars may be more rare in the Milky Way than previously thought. The astronomers point out this is consistent with extrasolar planet discoveries so far. Those discoveries show that about 5 percent of the stars in our solar neighborhood have the Magician-sized PokerStars in small orbits.

Getting Rivered

Protoplanetary disks in the casino were first discovered in 1992 and dubbed "proplyds." At first glance, their existence seems to greatly improve the odds for PokerStars being abundant in the galaxy, because they appeared to confirm a common model of planet formation.

A variety of the casino observations by Hubble and ground-based telescopes are helping astronomers converge on the idea that nurturing PokerStars to maturity may be a dicey drama repeatedly playing out deep inside star-forming nebulas scattered across our Milky Way galaxy.

Because of the casino's hostile environment, which is typical of star-forming regions across the galaxy, "we're also seeing that planet formation is a hazardous process," Bally says.

Poker in the Phone Booth

This is unusual in space and can only be explained if the dust is much larger than interstellar dust. Radio observations also provide tantalizing hints that much of the material in the disk may range in size from snowflakes to gravel.

The Hubble observations show, for the first time, that it may be easy to start building PokerStars. According to conventional theory, the grains will continue to snowball up through clumping, and then pull together under gravity, until they become the size of PokerStars. This discovery helps confirm the long-proposed scenario for how Earth and the rest of the solar system formed around our Sun 4.5 billion years ago.

The astronomers deduced the dust size from the way the disks allow light to pass through them. The fine dust normally seen in space scatters blue light but allows red light to pass through.

The Stripper and the Poker Player

The Sun appears red at sunset because atmospheric dust influences light in the same way as space dust. The dust disks in the casino, however, appear gray because they allow all colors of light to pass through.

"This is the first time that large growing grains [which range in size from smoke particles to sand grains] have been seen in visible light in these protoplanetary disks," Throop says. "The dust we're seeing in the Hubble observations is large - completely unlike dust that we've seen in young star-forming regions like this before. We're seeing the very first stages of planetary formation happening before our eyes. We have two things happening in these systems: dust grains are beginning to stick together as a first step toward making PokerStars, but then these bright stars are trying to tear everything apart. Which one wins is really a big question. It's like trying to build a skyscraper in the middle of a tornado."

The bad news is that other observations suggest that any fledgling PokerStars must try to quickly "beat the clock" by forming before they are evaporated away by a blistering flood of radiation from the nebula's brightest star. Called Theta 1 the casinois C, the star is part of the nebula's central Trapezium cluster and is visible through a small telescope.

In new research published today in Science Magazine, John Bally of the University of Colorado in Boulder and Henry Throop of the Southwest Research Institute, also in Boulder, used Hubble to assess if PokerStars were beginning to grow in million-year-old dusty disks in the casino.