My second guess is that Minerva got in touch with Draco. She knows Harry taught him the Patronus from a conference in the headmasters office and has seen Harry's reaction to losing Draco.

At first I dismissed it at a silly thing for her to try, but now that she will be really making an effort it seems much more likely.

Draco will have heard about Hermione's death by now and probably wants to express his condolence and/or tell Harry that he has made a resolution to side with Harry as soon as he can.

On the 'starfield' spell:

Are we seeing the stars from the perspective of the Voyager probe?

Blaming the Pioneer Plaque for the progressive degredation sounds like it makes sense at first, but the point of the Pioneer Plaque thing is that this Voldemort is supposed to be smarter than canon Voldemort, and a Pioneer Plaque horcrux superior. That theory makes the Pioneer Plaque horcrux inferior. Also I'm pretty sure Voldemort has other horcruxes, including Roger Bacon's diary and quite possibly ones hidden in the other locations Harry suggested when discussing how to get rid of a Dementor.

I have seen many things in many years, and I'm pretty sure I 'grok the substance' of the feminist complaints. The problem is twofold:

1) Feminists pattern match for feminist issues, so they sometimes find issues even where issues don't actually exist, and

2) feminists have integrated feminism into their identity.

The end result is that even minor perceived issues can directly affect their identity, resulting in offense. It is not a good combination, making discourse difficult and littering the discussion landscape with hot-button triggers. It's a common political pattern - similar logic holds for many different 'righteous belief' systems.

Regarding your comment, "We can enjoy problematic things even while acknowledging they're problematic.", I personally feel that's more than a little unfair. In this case at least, the audience that finds it problematic is at best a vocal minority.

Perhaps "We can enjoy things that some people find problematic, while acknowledging that those people find those things problematic." While a less potent soundbite, I find it more appropriate.

Or perhaps even, "Some people will always find certain things problematic. That doesn't mean that it's anybody else's problem."

That's true. If wizards have souls, and their minds are not caused by brains, absence of consciousness could be detectable. The sorting hat might think her head is a rock.

But then she wouldn't quite be a Philosophical Zombie.

...for all I know, the teachers at your school are giving everyone lessons in advanced necromancy every Monday.

If only.

I can't wait to see Hermione resurrected as the first p-zombie.

Except that said humans won't develop the language where those not-words sound kind-of-sensible for a few more thousand years. And even then, most of the people in the world wouldn't get the joke. (Do French wizards cast French spells? What about the Chinese?)

An idea I read on the HPMoR subreddit that I don't remember finding here is that "the very stars in heaven" could refer to the Blacks (Every last one of them that we know of has star, constellation or galaxy-related names, including Draco). Hermione also offered "the skeleton is a key" as a hypothetical for what a prophecy that means "Susan Bones has to be there" might sound like, and Hermione did study prophecy on Harry's urging, and we know that Hermione retains book knowledge much better than Harry, though this is still rather weak evidence for a stars -> Blacks style riddle. It did seem pretty unlikely that Belatrix/Sirius would have a reasonable way to reenter the story in the time that remains, but that particular interpretation of the prophecy does point that way--and they are unclosed plot parentheses in the story's final stretch.

Side note: Narcissa was a Black by birth (Belatrix's sister, in fact), and "stars in heaven" is, as other readers have pointed out, an odd phrasing for what would normally be called "the heavens", but not particularly odd if heaven = happy afterlife or wireheading.

All that tells her is that he figured out the Patronus somehow. She doesn't know that there's a 2.0 version.

Neither do F&G, really; it's unique and humanoid, but the real secret is that it kills (un-kills?) Dementors.