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So, have astronomers found a supermassive black hole blasted away from its galaxy and barrelling through intergalactic space... or is it just a weird galaxy?
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/have-astronomers-found-a-runaway-monster-black-hole/
Premium subscribers to my newsletter can read today about a gorgeous but weird galaxy that is not trying terribly hard to hide its cannibalistic tendencies.
https://badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/another-gorgeous-hubble-galaxy-but-it-has-many-secrets
Today's Bad Astronomy Newsletter covers a bunch of news from NASA's DART mission, which whacked an asteroid back in 2022. Very cool stuff including streaks on the asteroid moon's surface, the plume generated, and how the orbit of the binary pair changed!
Looks like the moon is safe from a 2032 asteroid impact — unfortunately, kinda — and if you want to keep up with the changing sky, the Rubin Observatory will be happy to alert you millions of times per day.
Elon Musk has already started plans to launch a million satellites.
Yes. A MILLION.
This is a colossally bad idea, and it's not too late to make your voice heard. I explain everything:
Normally, Thursday issues of my Bad Astronomy Newsletter go to Premium subscribers, but I put a bunch of today's above the paywall to give y'all a taste. Please sign up! That way I can pay my bills and eat and stay alive!
Great news! Physics Girl is making videos again!
Bad news: Attacks on science are so bad I need to talk at a rally on Saturday.
Interesting news: We need to find more near-Earth asteroids.
And it's all here!
Need a place to go to get away from <all this>? Paid subbies to my newsletter get a big ol' dose of the cosmos 3 times a week! Like today's issue about lightning on Mars, China may have already peaked its CO2 emission, and finding meteors seismically.
If you need a momentary distraction right now — and by heavens (literally) we all do — then here's a story about how our local supermassive black hole undergoes episodes of cosmic indigestion. The last one was just over a century ago!
https://badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/our-milky-way-s-supermassive-black-hole-has-a-hiccuppy-past
We've discovered over 6,000 alien worlds. But do these exoplanets have exomoons and exorings? Almost certainly! And we're allllllllmost there in discovering them, too.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-alien-exoplanets-have-exomoons-and-exorings/
Premium subbies to my newsletter can watch the debris from a catastrophic supernova explosion expand before their eyes!
https://badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/watch-a-supernova-explosion-sweep-through-space
A solar eclipse seen… FROM SPACE?!
Yup. And it's an annular one, too, making it extra cool.
https://badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/solar-eclipse-seen-from-space
And oh yeah by the way a small galaxy may be ramming through the Milky Way too so I wrote about that because why not.
A pulsar is one of the scariest objects in the universe, yet we keep finding planets orbiting them. Of course, any pulsar planet is gonna be weird… but still, here's an egg-shaped one that may once have been a star and got mostly eaten. So, yeah.
https://badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/an-egg-shaped-planet-orbits-a-death-star
@juanux Thank you!
@lwdupont Thanks!
In other news…
This was fun: a reader asked if aliens were in a galaxy 66 million light-years away, how big a telescope would they need to see dinosaurs on Earth?
Guess!
No; bigger. Try again. Nope, still bigger. Third try? Nope. Way, WAY bigger.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/could-aliens-in-another-galaxy-see-dinosaurs-on-earth/
@NatureMC Thank you!
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THE 1000th ISSUE OF MY BAD ASTRONOMY NEWSLETTER WAS JUST PUBLISHED.
</ahem>
Venus has lava tubes! That's so cool!
Or hot. Venus is a sucky place to live, but is super amazing for science.
A dying star beams a searchlight into space, illuminating its past.
https://badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/hubble-unscrambles-the-egg-nebula