Fair winds and following seas Artemis II! I’ll be on site at KSC today and am doubly proud to include information about @thenrao.bsky.social as I talk about space, rockets, science and the Moon! PS, the GBT is my favorite telescope. 🧪🔭
I just added that bit of information to my talking points!
I have nothing to add. The data is/are clear and compelling. They have been for more than 3 decades. Continuing to fetishize fossil fuels will have catastrophic results. 🧪
Pithy fact about science?!
None needed. Just savor this dizzying, dazzling image of star-forming regions in M33, the Triangulum Galaxy - one of our cosmic neighbors.
The universe is strange, but I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else.
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www.eso.org/public/image...
Newborns are a mess. It's remarkable humans make it to adulthood.
In the "good old days" infant mortality was as high as 30%.
Nostalgia for 'times gone by' has deadly consequences as more parents say 'no' to vitamin K for newborns. @newswise.bsky.social
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www.newswise.com/articles/stu...
I'm Dragonfly! GET TO KNOW ME!
This flying fortress of scientific instrumentation will zip around Saturn's moon Titan, where it rains organic molecules and hosts hydrocarbon seas! 🧪🔭
Titan's atmosphere also has vinyl cyanide (see image), which - in liquid methane - can form cell-like membranes.
"Take a ball (we'll call it Earth). Give it an elliptical orbit around an average star. Tilt it. Spin it. Add a moon. Include oceans, an atmosphere, landforms, polar caps, and monkeys that love burning stuff. Now predict the weather in Des Moines a week from Tuesday." H.T. to Bob Ryan ~1997 🧪
Arthur C. Clarke posited communication satellites in his story ‘Islands in the Sky.” As @philplait.bsky.social chillingly warns, satellite mega constellations are the Great Pacific Garbage Patch equivalent. Shareholder value > night sky. www.scientificamerican.com/article/ramp... 🧪🔭
On this day in 2013, a small band of hearty science journalists joined @thenrao.bsky.social for the inauguration of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile. Before venturing to San Pedro de Atacama, we enjoyed the sights and food of Santiago.🧪🔭 @noisyastronomer.com
My life sucks! Why? This bastard: Taliktaalik, a lobe-finned fish that decided to walk on land 375 million years ago. Spine & pelvis ideal for aquatic life, but a bipedal engineering disaster. Sciatic, double hip replacements, SI joint fusion; I had ‘em all. Intelligent design, my ass. Literally. 🧪
Prevention has a dollar value: TEENY-TINY compared to ~$781 billion dementia-related costs each year.
About 500,000 folks in the U.S. will be diagnosed in 2026; million NEW cases/year by 2060. Routine vaccinations are shown time and again to protected against age-related diseases. 🧪💉
The differences in what Webb’s infrared instruments reveal and conceal within the PMR 1 “Exposed Cranium” nebula is apparent in this side-by-side view. More stars and background galaxies shine through the view of Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera), while cosmic dust glows more prominently in the light captured by MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument). The dark center lane that contributes to this nebula’s distinctive brain-like appearance is more noticeable in NIRCam, but its apparent role in the ejection of material at the top and bottom of the nebula is seen more clearly in MIRI’s view. Observing the cosmos in various wavelengths of light provides a more complete picture of how the universe works.
Same telescope (JWST) -- both infrared images -- but ssttrreettcchhh the near-IR (left) to mid-IR (right, duh) and you see GINORMOUS differences! Why? Dust from this dying star glows more brightly in the mid-IR!
Dubbed "Cranium Nebula" ~5k light-years away. 🧪🔭🧠
science.nasa.gov/missions/web...
I “doom scroll,” too. But the QUALITY of doom is AMAZING these days! New data reiterates what we all should know: turn the feckin’ phone off in bed; unless you’re watching actual trauma surgeries. They help me sleep. 🧪🩺 www.newswise.com/articles/ame...
Is it just me, or does the potential new head of NSF remind you of Larry “Bud” Melman?
Venture capital management seems an odd background to navigate the nuances of peer review… 🃏 🧪www.science.org/content/article/trump-s-...
ESO excels at crafting evocative images that also expand our understanding of stellar evolution. Here, 2 stars were born together, grew old, and are now shuffling off their mortal coils. Shakespearean astrophysics, indeed. www.eso.org/public/image... 🧪🔭
Heading down to Cape Canaveral for March 6. Fair winds and following seas... Go Artemis II!
www.bbc.com/news/article...
Allow me to recommend the "Rabbit Hole of Research" podcast. We spent 90 minutes last night talking asteroid impacts and planetary defense, movies, novels, the Big Bang, and more. A champion of outreach and the public understanding of science. @jomega22.bsky.social
jothamaustin.substack.com 🧪🔭
Globular clusters are dense, kinda spherical agglomerations of up to 1 million (usually ancient and red) stars -- the dim, dull ornate ancient chandeliers of the universe.
The low-surface-brightness galaxy CDG-2, shown in this image from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, is dominated by dark matter and contains only a sparse scattering of stars. This galaxy is nearly invisible, but by using advanced statistical techniques, scientists identified it by searching for tight groupings of stars called globular clusters. At left, the white box marks the area that was examined. At right is a magnified view of that area. The circle marked with a dashed red boundary indicates the location of the dark-matter dominated galaxy. Within the red, dashed circle are four globular clusters outlined by small, blue circles. Several background galaxies also appear within the red circle, but these are not related to the galaxy CDG-2.
FOUND! A smattering of globular clusters & a sprinkling of stars glimmering through a whopping huge clump of dark matter: a so-called "dark galaxy." But with dark matter comprising 99% of this unconventional cosmic critter, dare we even call it a galaxy? 🧪🔭 iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3...
With a dish 110 meters across, the GBT is a pulsar-hunting machine!
Credit: Dana Berry: Visualization of a black hole
The first image of Sagittarius A*, or Sgr A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. OR... dark matter??? Credit: Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration
"What if we're wrong?"... one of the best questions to ask in science. 🔭🧪
What if the gravitational monster at the center of the Milky Way wasn't a black hole & was instead a dense core of dark matter? If true, it could explain many a vexing cosmic question.
Source: doi.org/10.1093/mnra...
In this composite image, red pixels mark locations on Europa’s surface where ammonia-bearing compounds were detected; purple indicates no such detection. Captured by NASA’s Galileo mission in 1997, the data is overlaid on a black-and-white mosaic that zooms in on a portion of the moon’s surface. NASA/JPL-Caltech
"Attempt No Landings There." Clarke
"Multiply flybys? Sure!" NASA
Europa Clipper arrives March 2031 to hopefully find habitable environs. New look at Galileo data raises hopes by confirming ammonia, another piece in the "potential for life puzzle."
iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3...
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Credit: Centre for the Subatomic Structure of Matter/University of Adelaide This animation simulates fluctuations in energy fields of the quantum vacuum that can be associated with virtual quark-antiquark pairs.
"Sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand."
On subatomic scales, fleeting particle/antiparticle pairs appear and disappear in the nothin' of the quantum vacuum. In energetic proton/proton collisions at the RHIC, virtual particles transform into real particles.🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
A dapper young man in a 3 piece suit with round framed glasses sits at the controls of a large antique looking telescope.
Happy birthday to Clyde Tombaugh, discoverer of Pluto in 1930 (when he was 24 years old).
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Headline in a venerable science publication: "NASA quietly pushed the launch date of the Artemis II moon mission into March..."
"Quietly" with a press conference, live video coverage, social-media posts, and updates to its homepage. Quietly like The Who's 1976 concert at Charlton Athletic Grounds.
Astronomers have discovered the most distant cosmic object to date: a weirdly luminous galaxy a mere 2% younger than the universe itself. If we put that in human terms, this galaxy would be like an 18-month-old toddler racing through puberty. 🧪 🔭Source: science.nasa.gov/missions/web...
So… a scratch?
I did catch them in 2002 (a while ago) yet recall seeing one every 10 seconds or so. Some were remarkably bright. I have yet to see a comparable shower, but hoping this might be the year.
ALMA's Long Baseline Campaign has produced a spectacularly detailed image of a distant galaxy being gravitationally lensed, revealing star-forming regions — something that has never been seen before at this level of detail in a galaxy so remote. The left panel shows the foreground lensing galaxy (observed with Hubble), and the gravitationally lensed galaxy SDP.81, which forms an almost perfect Einstein Ring, is hardly visible. The middle image shows the sharp ALMA image of the Einstein ring, with the foreground lensing galaxy being invisible to ALMA. The resulting reconstructed image of the distant galaxy (right) using sophisticated models of the magnifying gravitational lens, reveals fine structures within the ring that have never been seen before: several dust clouds within the galaxy, which are thought to be giant cold molecular clouds, the birthplaces of stars and planets. Credit: ALMA (NRAO/ESO/NAOJ)/Y. Tamura (The University of Tokyo)/Mark Swinbank (Durham University)
ALMA discovery in 2015 popped up in my OneDrive feed. Still amazing! Einstein ring -- massive foreground galaxy focusing light from more distant galaxy to reveal details never before seen in a galaxy so remote, including phenomenally massive yet concentrated clumps of star-forming material. 🧪🔭
ALMA is so cool! Well, it does observe the cold universe. Here’s a glimpse of what the Sun will look like a few billion years hence. 🧪🔭