Wandering Adventure Party

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!https://badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/way-too-much-dart-news

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.https://badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/looks-like-the-asteroid-2024-yr4-won-t-impact-the-moono-plus-rubin-observatory-sends-out-its-first-c

@badastro Elon Musk really seems to have a need to become the real world James Bond/Ethan Hunt/Luke Skywalker - supervillain.

@badastro really happy to see Physics Girl getting better

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.https://badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/more-martian-lightning-china-peaks-its-emission-and-satellite-re-entries-shake-the-ground

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

@badastro Hoping an Earth-sized exoplanet with a Moon-sized moon gets detected within my lifetime.

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-spaceAnd 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

@badastro ehh it doesn't work that way

@juanux Thank you!

Venus has lava tubes! That's so cool! Or hot. Venus is a sucky place to live, but is super amazing for science.https://badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/venus-has-lava-tubes

@NatureMC Thank you!

Hey! Tomorrow (Saturday Feb 14) at 11:15 Eastern US time I'll be talking to my friend, author/videoer John Green on the annual Project for Awesome livestream, raising money for great charities! You can get perks through donating, including meteorites I've sent them. See here:https://projectforawesome.com/

@badastro Hey! It’s really cute how your post ended up next to another picture of two black holes

A newly discovered comet might — MIGHT — get bright enough to put on an interesting show. Also, astronomers may have found evidence of the very first stars!https://badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/a-new-comet-to-watch-for-and-more-evidence-for-the-very-first-stars[Thursday issues are for Premium subscribers, but you can become one! All the cool kids do it.]

This amazing pic of the galaxy IC 5332 from JWST gave me some arachnophobic-like chills, but damn, it's so amazing. Read about it here!https://badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/a-spider-web-a-million-trillion-kilometers-wide-jwst-s-view-of-ic-5332[PS: this Tuesday issue is usually for paid subscribers but I put a lot of it above the fold because it's cool]