Styx (moon)

Styx is a small natural satellite of Pluto whose discovery was announced on 11 July 2012. It was imaged along with Pluto and Pluto's other moons by the New Horizons spacecraft in July 2015. Images of Styx, with a resolution of 3.1 km/px, were released on 9 October 2015.

Styx is the second satellite of Pluto by distance and the fifth discovered. It was discovered one year after Kerberos. Styx is approximately 7000700000000000000♠7 × 5 km across, and its orbital period is 20.2 days.

Discovery and observations

Styx was discovered by a team led by astronomer Mark R. Showalter, using fourteen sets of images taken between 26 June and 9 July 2012 by the Wide Field Camera 3 fitted to the Hubble Space Telescope. The discovery was announced on 11 July 2012. Styx is about half as bright as the dimmest previously known object in the system, Kerberos, and about one hundred thousandth as bright as Pluto. It was designated S/2012 (134340) 1, and informally referred to as P5.

The survey work leading to the discovery of Styx was in preparation for the mission of the unmanned New Horizons spaceprobe, which flew by the Pluto system on 14 July 2015. The discovery of another small Plutonian moon heightened concerns that this region of space may harbor more bodies too small to be detected, and that the probe could be damaged by an uncharted body or ring as it traversed the system at a speed of over 13 km/s; tiny moons, such as Saturn's moon Pallene, tend to be associated with tenuous rings or arcs, because their gravity is unable to hold on to material ejected by meteoroid impacts; such diffuse material represents the chief navigational hazard. However, the New Horizons probe did not detect any smaller moons or rings, and passed through the Pluto system safely.

Styx (Windmill game)

Styx was originally created by Windmill Software in 1983 and released as a copy-protected, bootable 5.25" floppy disk for the IBM PC/XT.

It is a clone of the 1981 arcade game Qix. Three significant differences are: the caterpillar (that can grow in size in later rounds), the introduction of diagonal movement (in contrast to Qix allowing only four directions), and the X1/X5/X10 multiplier that would color a claimed area corresponding to the color of the multiplier (also awarding that many points).

Styx used the same game engine as two other Windmill Software games, The Exterminator and Moonbugs, and these were some of the few programs to make use of the 16-color quasi-graphics CGA mode (normally the CGA could only use 4 or 2 color graphics). However, it was possible to play on a monochrome monitor as long as the graphics card also supported color graphics (e.g. a Genoa Color Graphics Card).

Styx, The Exterminator, and Moonbugs set CGA 320x200x4 mode on the title screen by directly manipulating the video registers; this causes them to display a screen full of garbage on later video cards. The in-game graphics also will only occupy half the screen due to technical differences between CGA and EGA/VGA, however the games can be patched to work correctly on VGA.

Styx (newspaper)

Styx (Greek: Στύξ) is a weekly newspaper that features local and general information. It is based in Akrata in the eastern part of Achaea, Greece. It was first published in 2004. It is the Independent Cultural and Political Newspaper of the Northern Peloponnese. Its editor-in-chief is Vasileios Antoniou.

See also

External links

9P (protocol)

9P (or the Plan 9 Filesystem Protocol or Styx) is a network protocol developed for the Plan 9 from Bell Labs distributed operating system as the means of connecting the components of a Plan 9 system. Files are key objects in Plan 9. They represent windows, network connections, processes, and almost anything else available in the operating system.

9P was revised for the 4th edition of Plan 9 under the name 9P2000 that contained various fundamental improvements. The latest version of the Inferno operating system also uses 9P2000. The Inferno file protocol was originally called Styx, but technically it has always been a variant of 9P.

A server implementation of 9P for Unix, called u9fs, is included in the Plan 9 distribution. A 9P OS X client kernel extension is provided by Mac9P. A kernel client driver for Linux is part of the v9fs project. 9P and its derivatives have also found application in embedded environments, such as the Styx on a Brick project.

Server applications

Many of Plan 9's applications take the form of 9P file servers. Examples include:

Moon

The Moon (in Greek: σελήνη Selene, in Latin: Luna) is Earth's only natural satellite. It is one of the largest natural satellites in the Solar System, and, among planetary satellites, the largest relative to the size of the planet it orbits (its primary). It is the second-densest satellite among those whose densities are known (after Jupiter's satellite Io).

The Moon is thought to have formed approximately 4.5 billion years ago, not long after Earth. There are several hypotheses for its origin; the most widely accepted explanation is that the Moon formed from the debris left over after a giant impact between Earth and a Mars-sized body called Theia.

The Moon is in synchronous rotation with Earth, always showing the same face with its near side marked by dark volcanic maria that fill between the bright ancient crustal highlands and the prominent impact craters. It is the second-brightest regularly visible celestial object in Earth's sky after the Sun, as measured by illuminance on Earth's surface. Although it can appear a very bright white, its surface is actually dark, with a reflectance just slightly higher than that of worn asphalt. Its prominence in the sky and its regular cycle of phases have, since ancient times, made the Moon an important cultural influence on language, calendars, art, and mythology.

Moon (visual novel)

Moon (styled as Moon.) is a Japanese adult visual novel developed by Tactics, a brand of Nexton, released on November 21, 1997 playable on Windows PCs. The game was described by the development team as a "Reaching the Heart AVG" (心に届くAVG, Kokoro ni Todoku AVG). The story follows the protagonist Ikumi Amasawa, a girl who joins an organization called Fargo in the hopes of discovering why and how her mother died, who was a member of the same group. The gameplay in Moon follows a branching plot line which offers pre-determined scenarios with courses of interaction, and focuses on the three female main characters. The game ranked twice in the national top 50 for best-selling PC games sold in Japan.

Much of the staff that created the game later became the founding members of the visual novel brand Key. Moon was the starting point for Key's origins, and was the first time the principal Key team was formed. A novel based on the game written by Midori Tateyama was released in July 1998 by Movic. The game's original soundtrack was released bundled with Dōsei's soundtrack in August 2000 at Comiket 58; Dōsei was Tactics' first game. Moon has been referenced in other media not directly related to the game, such as in Tactics' third game One: Kagayaku Kisetsu e, and in the second anime adaptation of Key's first game Kanon.

Natural satellite

A natural satellite is a celestial body that orbits another celestial body of greater mass (e.g., a planet, star, or dwarf planet), which is called its primary. For example, the Moon is a natural satellite of Earth, and Earth is a natural satellite of the Sun.

In the Solar System there are 173 known natural satellites which orbit within 6 planetary satellite systems. In addition, several other objects are known to have satellites, including three IAU-listed dwarf planets: Pluto, Haumea, and Eris.As of January 2012, over 200 minor-planet moons have been discovered. There are 76 known objects in the asteroid belt with satellites (five with two each), four Jupiter trojans, 39 near-Earth objects (two with two satellites each), and 14 Mars-crossers. There are also 84 known natural satellites of trans-Neptunian objects. Some 150 additional small bodies have been observed within the rings of Saturn, but only a few were tracked long enough to establish orbits. Planets around other stars are likely to have satellites as well, and although numerous candidates have been detected to date, none have yet been confirmed.