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Please note that I am NOT looking for advice on any of my health issues. I've already had one person recommend homeopathy to me, and you can imagine how I felt about that.
But in general — online and IRL — don't reply with advice to people who have not actively asked for it.
An update on my COVID, and a fun exploration into why compressed air sprays are so freaking cold! The answer, of course, is SCIENCE.
Update on my COVID, and how chemistry and physics help an inflamed tendon
Bad Astronomy Newsletter (badastronomy.beehiiv.com)
Not to be too obvious or tautological, but whaddya know, young-Earth creationists are wrong again!
A claimed lack of supernovae explodes in their faces
Bad Astronomy Newsletter (badastronomy.beehiiv.com)
No matter how you slice them, an active galaxy is one of the most terrifying sources of pwoer in the cosmos. But what we see does kinda depend on how we slice them. Here's a thing I wrote!
Voracious supermassive black holes light up the cores of “active” galaxies across the universe. How we see them, however, is a matter of perspective
Scientific American (www.scientificamerican.com)
Welp. I did it. I finally got COVID.
I'm fine now, but I do sincerely wish every ivermectin-chugging MAGA ass and every antivax RFK-supporting jerk of whatever political persuasion a very merry up yours.
So, some good and bad news.
Bad Astronomy Newsletter (badastronomy.beehiiv.com)
In this corner: OCSN-49, a star cluster with hundreds of members wandering the galaxy
And in THIS corner: a diffuse giant molecular cloud with 100,000 times the Sun's mass just minding its own business
It's the CLASH of the EONS! Who will win?
The answer surprised me, and I do so love being surprised.
Bad Astronomy Newsletter (badastronomy.beehiiv.com)
Here's a fun one: can you see Earth and the Moon together with your naked eye... from Mars?
I do the math!
If you pick the right time, our home world and our moon could be easily visible from the Red Planet
Scientific American (www.scientificamerican.com)
So, yeah, a mind-vaporizingly huge explosion in space *may have been from a white dwarf ripped to shreds by a black hole*.
yeGADS
Just writing that sentence made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up
Bad Astronomy Newsletter (badastronomy.beehiiv.com)
Because of course, asteroids from the vicinity of Venus may threaten Earth.
Bottom line: we need to look for them
Bad Astronomy Newsletter (badastronomy.beehiiv.com)
Faster than light travel is possible… kinda. Distant galaxies are receding from us at superluminal speeds. How can that be, and how can we see them if they're flying away faster than the light they emit?
Even weirder: to them, *you*re* moving FTL!
When space itself expands, weird things can happen—like galaxies breaking the universe’s ultimate speed limit
Scientific American (www.scientificamerican.com)
Look, almost everyone gets acne at some point in their life, but can you imagine being able to see it from 1.4 quadrillion kilometers away?
Did you know other stars get sunspots? And we can find them via their planets?
Bad Astronomy Newsletter (badastronomy.beehiiv.com)
Astronomers have caught a bouncing baby exoplanet feeding and growing pretty big!
AB Aurigae b is a young, massive planet still pulling material in to grow
Bad Astronomy Newsletter (badastronomy.beehiiv.com)
Note: This is for paying subbies to my newsletter, to and for whom I am very grateful.
Is it presumptuous of me to explain an xkcd comic? Well, I'm doing it anyway.
Also: sometimes, being inclusive is easy. But it's always the right thing to do, *especially* when you're dealing with a ten billion dollar telescope.
In which I write about xkcd and JWST
Bad Astronomy Newsletter (badastronomy.beehiiv.com)
Sure, you have family issues, but at least none of your siblings slammed into you at 18,000 kilometers per hour and sent your shattered pieces flying off into space with similar orbital elements.
I mean, probably.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/asteroid-families-reveal-solar-systems-secret-history/
Did you know there's a limit to how fast a black hole can feed? And that some break that limit? Here's one that does it by a *lot*.
Something is helping this black hole gobble down material at incredible rates
Bad Astronomy Newsletter (badastronomy.beehiiv.com)
[Paid subscribers only today]
Do *any* of TRAPPIST-1's planets have air? Maybe. Kinda. Maybe not.
This stuff is HARD.
Two more planets observed have ambiguous results, showing how difficult this is to determine
Bad Astronomy Newsletter (badastronomy.beehiiv.com)
Look, when you're a zombie star eating the entrails of a hot planet, sometimes you just need to cool things down a bit.
Yeah, some stories are just cooler than others
Bad Astronomy Newsletter (badastronomy.beehiiv.com)
How do you weigh a black hole? We're talking ten octillion tons for a *small* one. Plus it just eats the scale.
Gauging the mass of a black hole is tricky, but astronomers have devised multiple methods to measure the heft of these galactic gluttons
Scientific American (www.scientificamerican.com)
@cafuego WOW! Nice.
Premium subscribers to my Bad Astronomy Newsletter can read about a mysterious impact on the Moon traced to a Chinese rocket, and how astronomers have now discovered more than 6,000 exoplanets!
But what was that booster carrying? Mysteries abound.
Bad Astronomy Newsletter (badastronomy.beehiiv.com)