This is a new type of piece for me, but it seemed like a lot of fun, so I am giving it a whirl for this week’s Wednesday editorial.

I think that I have made this point before, but if not, I absolutely adore Twin Spica, one of Vertical Inc.‘s new manga darlings that has been taking the reviewer world by storm. The series is about a cute girl trying to become an astronaut and her friends, one of which is most likely the ghost of a dead astronaut (and who also reminds me of Mumford and Sons’ single Little Lion Man).

Something that I find interesting about the title of Twin Spica is its reference to the star Spica (SPIKE-uh) which is a binary star that is part of the Virgo constellation (hence, Twin Spica). On Monday evening, if you had a clear sky instead of terrible snow, the binary star system of Spica aligned itself with the Moon and Jupiter in a vertical line, an impressive sight which was occluded by Ohio’s lovely storm weather system.

The two twins are locked in orbit together, and are white hot, hundreds of thousands degrees hotter than our own sun. Their proximity often causes clashes of their solar flares, resulting in a high amount of of X-Ray and UV radiation waves reaching the Earth from their position 260 light years away. The Twins Spica are generally considered the 15th brightest star in the night sky, but if you were to look at the night sky for X-Rays or UV rays, Spica would probably be the brightest object in the night sky, even surpassing our own Moon in brightness.

Cosmology-unrelated – a spica is another name for the spikelets that are a part of the head of wheat, although I have a substantial amount of doubt that wheat facts will ever be a part of Twin Spica.

Do you know any interesting trivia about Twin Spica? If so, bring it to the comments section!