Terrazzo hints for Sunday, August 23, 2026

Today's subject comes from cosmos.

The caption reads: “The wreckage of a star that was seen exploding in 1054.”

You place 11 stones into a frame of 62 cells. Every cell is filled exactly once.

• Kinship. Same-coloured stones that touch make a region. Today: gold forms 4 separate regions of 14, 5, 3, 1; lapis blue forms 7 separate regions of 3, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1; moss green forms 3 separate regions of 6, 4, 1; terracotta forms 4 separate regions of 9, 6, 3, 1.
• Solitude. No two sun cells may touch, not even corner to corner.
• The Vein. The vein cells must form one unbroken path between the frame's two notches, with no branches and no loops.

Start with the largest region the Laws name: it has the fewest ways to fit.

The Crab Nebula

In July of 1054, astronomers in China recorded a 'guest star' bright enough to be seen in daylight for over three weeks. What they witnessed was a supernova six and a half thousand light-years away — a star many times the Sun's mass, collapsing and detonating. The Crab Nebula is that explosion still in progress: a cloud of glowing shrapnel six light-years wide, expanding at fifteen hundred kilometers per second. At its heart spins the crushed remnant, a neutron star sweeping a lighthouse beam of radiation across space thirty times each second.