Betelgeuse, the cannibal.
“Bad Astronomer” Phil Plait, over at SyFy.com, explains a new study that demonstrates how the red giant Betelgeuse might have gotten so big – by […]
astronomy
Help track satellites (for astronomers worried that they’re starting to block out the stars.)
Satellite Streak Watcher is a project on the AnecData citizen science site that asks anyone with a cell phone to take a picture of the […]
There are campfires on the Sun.
Science Daily shares some of the discoveries from the first images of the Solar Orbiter mission – including the presence of “mini-flares” that astronomers have […]
Radio telescopes have spotted four very strange… things.
LiveScience has more on the entirely new, bright-edged circular objects, the so-called “odd radio circles” or ORCs that astronomers are struggling to figure out: In […]
Maybe ‘Oumuamua was a hydrogen iceberg. Not a comet. Not an asteroid. Hydrogen.
Scientific American has an unexpected explanation for the mysterious interstellar object dubbed “‘Oumuamua” that drifted into our solar system in 2017. Maybe the monolithic object […]
Music of a pulsing star reveals its inner structure.
Nature looks inside pulsing stars – not pulsars, but a group called “δ Scuti stars” – that flicker in a regular enough pattern that astronomers […]
Science Art: Albumasar De magnis coniunctionibus, 1515
Click to embiggen Ja’far ibn Muḥammad Abū Ma’shar wrote a book – and published it in Venice. It was the place to be, and to […]
Science Art: Cosmic Reef, by the Hubble Space Telescope
Click to embiggen Astronomers are marking the 30th anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope with a “ portrait of a firestorm of starbirth in a […]
SONG: In the Sounding Deep
SONG: “In the Sounding Deep”. ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: Scientific American, April 2020, “Undersea Telescopes Scan the Sky from Below,” as used in the post “Telescopes […]
Bored with hanging out at home? Count some penguins (or spot some galaxies) for science.
Scientific American has some suggestions for your self-isolation. There are a few ways you can help researchers out without ever leaving home: “I think where […]
Telescopes deep under the sea are revealing secrets of deep space.
Scientific American has more on how some astronomers are using the ocean itself to scan the skies: Suspended near the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea […]
Our galaxy is bigger than we’d thought.
Science News reports that astronomers have found the dark edge of the Milky Way – the unlit mass of dark matter spinning beyond the bright […]
Science Art: Hemisphere Austral, XVIII from Atlas Coelestis, by John Flamsteed, 1729.
Click to embiggen From 1675 until his death in 1719, John Flamsteed worked at the newly built Greenwich Observatory, charting the stars in the sky. […]
Betelgeuse was maybe just dusty, not dying.
Science News checks back on the big star that suddenly went dim (as regular readers here will remember) a couple of months ago, prompting some […]
They found a merging pair of black holes. And they named the formation “Spikey.”
Scientific American introduces us to a a couple of black holes named Spikey: In 2017 astrophysicists Daniel D’Orazio and Rosanne Di Stefano detailed how a […]