Wandering Adventure Party

@badastro Oh don't you astronomers start as well!!! That bloody man @philipcball had everyone in chemistry up in arms about molecules and then bonds and then something else. Turns out the closer you look the less you can define. The world is such a maddening place.

@badastro we need a word for the unique and multilayered levels of grief when a college educated formerly critical thinker falls for theconspiracy shit

Paid subbies to my newsletter can read today about an encounter I had with President Bartlet, Josh Lyman, and Charlie Young, allowing me to achieve a life goal.https://badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/that-one-time-i-met-some-west-wingers

@badastro dammit!lol

@badastro thankfully, the Sun is relatively stable - even compared to others in its class. Also, we'd have to be pretty unfortunate to be within the solid angle defined by the flare. Having said that ...

Paid subscribers to my newsletter can learn today about a citizen science project to find asteroids that think they're comets.https://badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/pin-the-tail-on-the-asteroid

@badastro Yet another person who sees the light, welcome to the bright side of the moon.

@badastro Hoping he's not another AL.

@badastro there are no loud punk bands In space. Thank God!

Paid subscribers to my newsletter can read all about the extremely cool close-up images (and video!) of the asteroid 52246 Donaldjohanson taken by the Lucy spacecraft… and why the names are so important.https://badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/lucy-takes-a-close-up-look-at-an-asteroid-with-an-appropriate-name

@badastro that's what annoyed me about this story. they're close now, but the timescales involved... we will presumably have drifted far apart on our journeys around the milky way core long before... we crash into andromeda and everything gets thrown around anyway. and a long time after that, these may go boom.(not to mention the sun... oh you know…)

@badastro "K2-18b (note the lower-case “b”, denoting it’s a planet) is about 2.6 times the Earth’s diameter and 8.6 times its mass. Some people call it a super-Earth, but in my opinion that’s misleading; it’s more likely a mini-Neptune at that size and mass (so a small gas giant instead of gigantic rocky world)"8.6x Earth mass with only 2.6x diameter is way too dense to be a gas giant.Hm, I take that back. volume = 4/3 pi * r^3, 2.6x diam is 17.5x larger volume. Half density of earth, ok.

FInding Orcs in Middle Earth is one thing, but finding ORCs in the heavens is entirely another.https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-are-orcs-astronomers-still-dont-know/

Ho hum, just another staggeringly gorgeous Hubble image of a nearby kooky galaxy that you can make super huge and gawp at.https://badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/hubble-tips-hat-to-the-sombrero-galaxy-more-weird-white-dwarfs

NGC 1514 is a nebula, the gas and dust ejected from a dying star. But hoo boy, is it *weird*. When you observe it with JWST, it looks like, well…… a transparent tuna fish can with bright glowing rims. Why?Good question. We don't know.https://badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/incredible-jwst-image-of-ngc-1514-s-double-ringed-mystery

@badastro perhaps a past interaction between Andromeda and another large galaxy stripped Andromeda of it's satellite galaxies on one side? #Andromeda #Space

If you're up before dawn over the next couple of weeks, a planetary delight awaits you in the east: Saturn, Mercury, and Venus all huddled together! Words by me:https://www.cntraveler.com/story/planetary-cluster-april-2025

A star by any other name would still fuse as sweet.https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-a-star/

Paid subbies to my newsletter can see how (and how we know) the building-sized potentially Earth-impacting asteroid 2024 YR4 is shaped like a battered hockey puck, and also how an exoplanet was detected in X-rays!https://badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/asteroid-2024-yr4-is-a-hockey-puck-and-an-exoplanet-seen-in-x-rays-kinda

When was the first exoplanet discovered? You might read it was in 1992, but in fact the first evidence for the existence of alien worlds was found before then. Way before then.Like, in *1917*.I love this story.https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/when-was-the-first-exoplanet-discovered/