Wandering Adventure Party

JWST has discovered an exoplanet via direct imaging!https://badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/jwst-spies-a-saturn-sized-planet-from-a-quadrillion-kilometers-away-1529

Happy Asteroid Day! And it's almost aphelion! And my 900th issue!To celebrate all this cosmic coolness I'm discounting subscriptions to my newsletter by 20% — it's now $4.80/month or $48/year! You can sign up here:https://badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/the-andromeda-galaxy-gets-psychedelic-b9f7

A star passing close enough to the solar system can do considerable damage, including *ejecting entire planets into interstellar space*. Weird thing is, one of the planets most vulnerable to this is NOT the one you'd think.https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/could-the-solar-system-lose-a-planet-to-a-passing-star/

@badastro The sky is full of rocks.

@badastro “I’M SIGNIFICANT!” — Dust Speck

I can think of a LOT of places in the universe I'd rather be than in the middle of a clump of nearly a dozen quasars blasting out planet-vaporizing amounts of energy. The question is, what are they doing there in the first place?https://badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/a-clump-of-quasars-really-defies-the-odds-ba8b

@badastro "If you approach the planet from behind..."Ahhhh..... Like grabbing a car when you're on a bike or skateboard. That's awesome. I thought it was based on geometry somehow.

A city-sized sphere of neutrons with the mass of a star is doing weird stuff while plowing through the gas floating around the galaxy.https://badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/a-pulsar-plucks-the-guitar-nebula-2d88This article is for paid subscribers, who literally make it possible for me to buy food and stay alive.

@badastro with the addition of the word, "indeed" at the end I had no choice but to hear that in the voice of Sir David Attenborough

@sellathechemist Sorry, I saw this too late.

@badastro I'm curious about how this compares to CNS5, which came out in 2023.https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2023A%26A...670A..19G/abstract

IC 3225 is a weird galaxy: teardrop-shaped, it seems to be the wrong shape and the wrong distance from us!https://badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/the-enigma-s-of-the-lovely-galaxy-ic-3225-cdf1[Note: this issue is for paid subscribers; Mondays are free but T/Th are for premium subs]

@badastro We are dealing with the fundamentalist regressive party. Back to 1939.

So, did our local supermassive monster black hole eat a slightly smaller but still quite huge black hole some time in the cosmically recent past?Actually, yeah, maybe!https://badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/did-our-local-supermassive-black-hole-recently-eat-its-little-sibling-479f

My new conspiracy theory: Earth is indeed round, but its orbit is shaped like a bowling pin. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-the-analemma/

Hi! I have a newsletter I put out three times a week. Free subscribers get issues on Mondays, but paid subbies get Tuesdays and Thursdays as well.Like today's about an *incredible* image of colliding galaxies, and also the Curiosity rover seen from orbit.https://badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/a-second-look-at-a-spectacular-galactic-collision-curiosity-from-mars-orbit-e7d6

The good folks at STScI released a very cool video where you do a fly-around of the Hyades star cluster that makes up the bulk of the constellation Taurus.Astrology is still Taurus feces, though.https://badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/taurus-in-3d-d18e

@badastro My husband works for NASA, specifically NASA Earth. Yanno, the people who make the fire maps that save lives?Reading your article: how the fuck is it "America First" if these assholes are giving information to our enemies?Republican voters love being lied to. That's all I can think. They love being told one thing when leadership is actually doing another.Anyway. Thanks for posting this. People need to know what's going on.

Have you ever wondered exactly why we spend so much money, time, and effort to build space telescoeps when we have so many on the ground? The reason is atmospheric.https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-do-we-launch-space-telescopes/

@badastro Although it would be fun if we discovered Planet Nine was populated entirely by monkeys with wrenches