SONG: Fast Blue Optical Transients
SONG: “Fast Blue Optical Transients”. ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: Science News 13 Dec 2021, “The cosmic ‘Cow’ may have produced a new neutron star or black […]
astronomy
Bright and really heavy: What “The Cow” caused in deep space.
Science News shares an explanation for an intense puzzle that’s had astronomers searching for solutions since June 2018. Now, astrophysicist DJ Pasham and his team […]
Science Art: Exocomets Around Beta Pictoris – Artist View, 2013.
This is a painting for NASA of the formation of a distant solar system, used to illustrate the article “Formation of the Solar System: Birth […]
Science Art: Total Eclipse of the Sun (from a painting by Kranz), 1897
This is the frontispiece to A New Astronomy for Beginners, by David P. Todd, an 1897 textbook on the latest astronomical breakthroughs. The passage on […]
SONG: Curling at the Edges
SONG: “Curling at the Edges”. ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: Science, 1 Aug 19, “The Milky Way is more warped than astronomers thought,” as used in the […]
Our galaxy is warped. Just a little.
Science reports that the Milky Way isn’t quite as flat, edge-on, as we thought. It’s got a slight but detectable S-curve, like a piece of […]
Why haven’t we found aliens? Maybe because the most common star type is lousy at sustaining life.
Inverse looks at a potential answer to the puzzle of why, in a universe filled with so many stars, we haven’t found any evidence of […]
Betelgeuse burped.
New Scientist explains that reason Betelgeuse recently appeared to dim in the sky was that it was expelling gas: Miguel Montargès at Sorbonne University in […]
Farfarout is as far, far out as you can get (and still be in the Solar System).
NSF’s NOIRLab looks at a body that the Gemini Observatory spotted in 2018 and that astronomers working at Hawaii’s Subaru telescope nicknamed Farfarout. Now, they’ve […]
Alpha Centauri’s possible planet: a warm Neptune, a very large Earth.
Scientific American wonders whether we’ve just spotted a new planet orbiting Alpha Centauri, our sun’s nearest neighbor. If it’s there, that potential planet is in […]
Science Art: Perihelion Parts of Orbits of the August and November Meteor-showers
Click to embiggen Where the meteors come from in August and November, as pictured in A new astronomy for beginners, 1898, as found on archive.org. […]
Look southwest.
NASA has details on how to spot the Great Conjunction – the giant planets Jupiter and Saturn appearing almost as a single point of light […]
Science Art: Thanksgiving Day sunspots (SOHO EIT 171 Latest Image: 2020/11/26 13:00), by NASA & ESA
Click to embiggen This is what our Sun looked like on Thanksgiving Day. There are sunspots across the lower right of the image, visible here […]
Science Art: At the edge of the blast, Hubble Space Telescope, 2020.
Click to embiggen From the ESA Image Gallery, dated 28 Aug 2020, comes an image of a portion of the Cygnus supernova, a blast wave […]
Molecular ring on Titan could be key to life on Earth.
New Scientist looks at the origins of life – which may be revealed by a ring-shaped molecule we just found on Saturn’s moon Titan: The […]