cue a bunch of mobile bases crawling across the surface of the Moon escaping the light of the day — stay in the dark side, they say.

A black hole rendering engine written in Houdini's VEX, featuring gravitational lensing, doppler shifting and a detailed accretion disk at all zoom levels.
#space #art by Josh Meister.
www.artstation.com/artwork/9md4Vq

I updated the Eta Corvi page in #Wikipedia today. Hope it's a lot more modern now.

#astronomy #space #star #EtaCorvi

“I believe everything happened for a reason.”
- Sakura Miko

If you are protesting thinking that real change is coming immediately that’s not how any movement works - it’s slow, painstaking and gradual - until it isn’t - then it seems like all at once. You have to put in the hard work.

Social movement scholar here to comment on No King again. a 🧵:

These protests are important b/c:

1.) as sustained image events, protests offer evidence of continued disapproval of the direction the country is going and disavowal of the country's leadership.

There will be more protests today than any other day in American history. Please join us at your local No Kings event to reject the regime’s brutality at home and abroad: www.nokings.org?SQF_SOURCE=i... #NoKings

JWST debris disc imaging...I wonder how one tells apart the underlying planetesimal discs, and migrated dust?

Photo of slide with quote "We built a great house We just need to throw a better party"

Great roundup of research on the (lack of) a good transition to Bluesky by the science community from @smcgrath.phd

"We built a great house.
We just need to throw a better party"

Scientists solve decades-long mystery about why Saturn appears to change its spin Researchers at Northumbria University have used the most powerful space telescope ever built to answer one of the longest-standing puzzles in planetary...

Our latest paper! Thanks to Melina Thévenot for the use of her incredible Saturn image.

Artistic illustration of ZTF J1239+8347, an extremely tight binary brown dwarf system that is undergoing mass transfer, where the more massive component (the accretor) directly pulls material from the less massive component (the donor). Material pulled from the donor is concentrated into a narrow stream of gas that flows directly into the accretor's atmosphere, heating up to a very high temperature of 8900 K and creating a bright blue hotspot in the accretor's atmosphere. Due to the extremely small separation between the components (center-to-center separation of ~170,000 km), both are tidally deformed into teardrop shapes pointing toward each other. In addition, both components orbit and rotate extremely quickly with a period of 57.41 minutes, which further deforms them into oblate teardrops (oblateness ~10%). Both components are L-type brown dwarfs, having temperatures a bit above 1000 K. This temperature makes them glow orange-red in visible wavelengths, though the slightly hotter accretor glows slightly more orange (ignoring its bright blue hotspot). Due to their extremely fast rotation, the components' atmospheres are highly turbulent and extremely windy, dominated by numerous bands over their latitudes. Numerous convection cells and vortices are depicted on their poles, inspired by brown dwarf atmosphere simulations. Due to the highly oblate shapes of the brown dwarfs, internal light is blocked out by their thicker equators, resulting in a darker and more opaque equator (gravity darkening). The gravity darkening effect is depicted for the donor but not for the accretor, whose equator glows bright blue to yellow due to the hotspot being smeared across the accretor's equator via strong zonal winds.

My favorite binary brown dwarf system, ZTF J1239+8347! These two red-hot dwarfs orbit so closely together that one devours gas from its partner and becomes superheated with a brilliant blue glow.

Handdrawn over 2 days. (1/5; see my explanation!)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZTF_J12...
#spaceart #sciart

TWO recently accepted papers on arxiv today from our group, led by PhD students @maddielam.bsky.social and @astrotoole.bsky.social. If you like brown dwarfs, variability, clouds, aurorae and/or magnetic spots there is something here for you! 👀

arxiv.org/abs/2603.24662
arxiv.org/abs/2603.24663

Spacecraft With Interstellar Medium Momentum Exchange Reactions: The potential and limitations of propellantless interstellar travel All known interstellar transportation methods encounter monumental technological or engineering roadblocks, or even rely on speculative unknown science. In particular light of the recent public excite...

Someone I am working with is using the SWIMMER concept (this one arxiv.org/abs/1808.02019). But secondary source info is scant, and as you can guess, this name is really really not conducive for searching.

OMG IT WORKS IT WORKS IT WORKS 😍😍😍 🔭☄️

This is the first ever gravitational wave posted directly to the ATProtocol, in a machine readable format that anyone can stream in real time with nebra*:

*(once I release v0.1)

Me neither, though in my case I just haven't heard of much at all.

the serious answer is that we need a wholesale recommitment on the left to public higher education as a high quality low/no cost public good rather than a jobs training licensing agency.

I do not anticipate this happening.

Ya I just learned about that recently in ToughSF. Or at least you need to do some weird things like spin-polarizing it, or...add antimatter to it?

Have never done the math myself and it's quite peripheral to my fields, but after seeing ToughSF people talk about it, yeah I am seeing a glimpse of it.

Like, what do you mean fusion rockets' exhaust velocity is 1000 km/s and not 20000 km/s, what do you mean the acceleration is 1e-4 m/s

Interstellar travel turns out to be really, really hard, it seems.

A cosmic first! 🚨

Hubble has spotted a comet that slowed and reversed its spin. Outgassing jets acted like thrusters, literally pushing it into a new rotation, shown here in this science visualization: https://news.stsci.edu/4c2u6hv

The actual reality of what’s going on with NASA is a real trip when juxtaposed with what a hit the NASA-saturated “Project Hail Mary” film seems to be.

I wonder how many people who enjoyed the film are aware of just how much this admin has shanked all the cool real-world research it featured.

a screenshot of a video game with the name tokino sora on the top Alt: Tokino Sora, from Hololive, doing a little jig

The only Sora I respect

I realize this is not a universally held preference, but I just want to point out that For $10 billion we could have orbiters and probes to both Uranus and Neptune, and they would likely succeed at that price tag, unlike this venture

I hope China moves ahead with the Tianwen-4 secondary Uranus probe, and the proposed 2039 Neptune mission.

quite a strange girl.

Illustration of Gamma-Cas and its hungry white dwarf companion. At the centre of a black canvas a large ball shines in shades of white and blue. The ball is surrounded by a light-blue and white disc with a fuzzy texture, like that of a dense gas. The disc connects by a bluish ribbon to a smaller disc surrounding a smaller glowing white ball, located in the lower left of the image. Two light-blue, shiny, arches of gas shoot out from opposite sides of the smaller disc and meet at the top-pole of the smaller ball.

XRISM solves the 50-year mystery of a famous star 🌟

An invisible companion consuming material from the star gamma-Cas has been revealed as the culprit for curious X-rays coming from the stellar system 👉 www.esa.int/Science_Expl...

🔭 🧪

random dharmachakra cameo in anime

This name seems to have disappeared from the Catalog of Star Names (exopla.net/star-names/m...). Is this intentional?

A NEW ARXIV PREPRINT ON 70 OPHIUCHI??? YOOO

user abbiistabbii: The Germans really cooked making "Hobbyless behaviour" an insult. It is both devastating, applicable to a wide range of people and behaviours, and doesn't resort to swearing. Man ranting on the internet about the Superbowl halftime show or complaining that something is "woke"? Hobbyless Behaviour. Girls mocking another girl for not looking right? Hobbyless Behaviour. Mindless vandalism? Hobbyless Behaviour. It is more powerful than "get a life" or the English "You're Sad" because it gets to the central point of the matter, and that is wonderful. Danke, Deutsch.

I don't normally subscribe to the "German has a word for it" thing because all languages can invent and borrow new words!

That said, I can't stop thinking about "hobbyless" as an insult since I saw it a few days ago, so here you go

It promotes a growth mindset!!
www.tumblr.com/abbiistabbii...