"Christmas is not in tinsel and lights and outward show. The secret lies in an inner glow. It's lighting a fire inside the heart. [...] It's glorious dream in the soul of man." ~ W. A. Peterson in 'The Art of Living' #MerryChristmas everybody✨🎄🎅 ➡️ eso.org/public/image... 🔭 🧪 #Universe

Too ambitious? Absolutely! 🙂 I suggest a compromise: close one tab per day in 2026. By NYE you’ll either be a legend… or have opened 2000 more to replace them. Good luck — may your tabs be ever in your favor! #NYE2026

"Christmas is not in tinsel and lights and outward show. The secret lies in an inner glow. It's lighting a fire inside the heart. [...] It's glorious dream in the soul of man." ~ W. A. Peterson in 'The Art of Living' #MerryChristmas everybody✨🎄🎅 ➡️ eso.org/public/image... 🔭 🧪 #Universe

🔭 🧪 #extragalactic 🧵 1/ Admire this captivating image of the spectacular spiral galaxy NGC 300, located approximately 6 Mly away in Sculptor. What is striking about the image is the extraordinary abundance of stars that can be seen. Image source➡️ apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap24120...

🧵 On 14 July 2025, the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) collaboration announced to have detected GW231123, a gravitational wave signal generated by the merger of the two most massive black holes ever observed. With masses of approximately 100 and 140 times that of the Sun, these cosmic giants 🔭 🧪 #cosmology

Running a bit late on solstice cheers, but this #Hubble image alone is pure gold: breathtaking face-on view of spiral galaxy NGC 1309. 🔭 Bonus — it has helped us nail down the cosmic distance ladder using Cepheids and Type Ia supernovae. Definitely worth your time — go read the article! 🧪📖

🧵 Westerlund 2 looks just like a holiday scene in this new, magical image from the JWST. Those red and orange gas clouds and thousands of bright stars recall the #Christmas vibe. ➡️ esawebb.org/images/potm2... 🔭 🧪 #Webb #Universe #galactic #JWST 1/6

Running a bit late on solstice cheers, but this #Hubble image alone is pure gold: breathtaking face-on view of spiral galaxy NGC 1309. 🔭 Bonus — it has helped us nail down the cosmic distance ladder using Cepheids and Type Ia supernovae. Definitely worth your time — go read the article! 🧪📖

Today, the December solstice occurred at 15:03 UT. 🔭 Although the #solstice itself lasts only a moment, the term also refers to the day on which it occurs. It marks the shortest and longest day of the year respectively in the Northern & Southern Hemisphere. 🧪 ➡️ www.youtube.com/watch?v=kS57... 1/2

🧵 Westerlund 2 looks just like a holiday scene in this new, magical image from the JWST. Those red and orange gas clouds and thousands of bright stars recall the #Christmas vibe. ➡️ esawebb.org/images/potm2... 🔭 🧪 #Webb #Universe #galactic #JWST 1/6

🧵 This striking composite image, made combining data from Chandra (X-ray light) & VLT MUSE (optical light) & Hubble, shows a supernova remnant with a lonely neutron star. ➡️ chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2018/e... For the first time a special kind of neutron star, having 🔭 🧪 #stellarastro #science

"On that blue dot, that's where everyone you know and everyone you ever heard of, and every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives." ― #CarlSagan December 20, 1996: Carl Sagan passed away. 🔭 🧪 #PaleBlueDot #Voyager1 #HistSci #Science 1/2

Today, the December solstice occurred at 15:03 UT. 🔭 Although the #solstice itself lasts only a moment, the term also refers to the day on which it occurs. It marks the shortest and longest day of the year respectively in the Northern & Southern Hemisphere. 🧪 ➡️ www.youtube.com/watch?v=kS57... 1/2

Picture a stellar newborn that, between one hiccup and the next, launches jets of gas at insane speeds, leaving behind a trail of rings like footprints in the cosmos. 🔭 That's the story told by the recent discovery on SVS 13, a protostar... ➡️ www.almaobservatory.org/en/press-rel... 🧪 #Science 1/9

"On that blue dot, that's where everyone you know and everyone you ever heard of, and every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives." ― #CarlSagan December 20, 1996: Carl Sagan passed away. 🔭 🧪 #PaleBlueDot #Voyager1 #HistSci #Science 1/2

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Picture a stellar newborn that, between one hiccup and the next, launches jets of gas at insane speeds, leaving behind a trail of rings like footprints in the cosmos. 🔭 That's the story told by the recent discovery on SVS 13, a protostar... ➡️ www.almaobservatory.org/en/press-rel... 🧪 #Science 1/9

Emblematic anecdote! Pauli, an undisputed genius, here stumbles in one of his rare failures of intuition – and what a failure! Wu’s experiment gave him a memorable lesson: even the “scourge of God” of physics is not infallible. By the way, Pauli was a ruthless... ⚛️ 🧪 #histsci 1/2

🧵 For people who missed it, there is a #JWST recent image depicting a rare and fascinating astronomical phenomenon: an Einstein ring. ➡️ esawebb.org/images/potm2... The spectacular image shows two distant galaxies, which at first glance look like a single galaxy 🔭 🧪 #extragalactic #cosmology

🔭 🧪 ⚛️ #sciart This breathtaking photo by Brent Mckean features a few atmospheric optics phenomena due to refraction, reflection and diffraction of moonlight from millions of falling ice crystals. Image source➡️ apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap20022...

🧵 This image provides an overview of the 25 brightest stars in the night sky (as seen by humans). It shows them in true color, highlighting their beauty and diversity. ➡️ apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap25061... For more, read the thread. 🔭 🧪 #stellarastro #science #Universe #Astronomy #HistSci

Emblematic anecdote! Pauli, an undisputed genius, here stumbles in one of his rare failures of intuition – and what a failure! Wu’s experiment gave him a memorable lesson: even the “scourge of God” of physics is not infallible. By the way, Pauli was a ruthless... ⚛️ 🧪 #histsci 1/2

🧵 Ever wonder what the baby universe looked like—just 800 million years after the Big Bang? JWST has given us an amazing glimpse via a galaxy called Virgil, hidden in the iconic Hubble eXtreme Deep Field. ➡️ news.arizona.edu/news/monster... 🔭 🧪 #extragalactic #science #cosmology #JWST 1/11

🧵 A recent study describes AT2022wtn, a tidal disruption event (TDE), that is, an event in which a star was destroyed by the tidal forces of a supermassive black hole (SMBH). Image from the research paper: academic.oup.com/mnras/articl... 🔭 🧪 #cosmology #extragalactic #science #Astronomy

🧵 Ever wonder what the baby universe looked like—just 800 million years after the Big Bang? JWST has given us an amazing glimpse via a galaxy called Virgil, hidden in the iconic Hubble eXtreme Deep Field. ➡️ news.arizona.edu/news/monster... 🔭 🧪 #extragalactic #science #cosmology #JWST 1/11

🧵 This aurora and SAR arc (according to the author Graeme Whipps), taken on Dec. 1, 2023 at Chapel of Garioch (Aberdeenshire, Scotland), give us a view of rare beauty. The SAR arcs, or Stable Auroral Red arcs, were discovered only in 1956.🔭 spaceweathergallery2.com/indiv_upload... 🧪 #science 1/4

🧵 Here is Messier 106 (or NGC 4258), a true cosmic marvel in the constellation Canes Venatici. Image Credit: NASA, ESO , NAOJ, Giovanni Paglioli; Assembling and Processing: R. Colombari and R. Gendler ➡️ apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap19031... 🔭 🧪 #science #universe #extragalactic #astronomy 1/5

🧵 This aurora and SAR arc (according to the author Graeme Whipps), taken on Dec. 1, 2023 at Chapel of Garioch (Aberdeenshire, Scotland), give us a view of rare beauty. The SAR arcs, or Stable Auroral Red arcs, were discovered only in 1956.🔭 spaceweathergallery2.com/indiv_upload... 🧪 #science 1/4

1/n #WomenInSTEM 🔭🧪⚛️ 12 December 1921: Henrietta Swan Leavitt, a great pioneer of modern astronomy, passed away. Her name is not familiar to most people and she is certainly not as recognizable as Galileo, W. Herschel, or E. Hubble, even though it ought to be.⤵️

🧵 Here is Messier 106 (or NGC 4258), a true cosmic marvel in the constellation Canes Venatici. Image Credit: NASA, ESO , NAOJ, Giovanni Paglioli; Assembling and Processing: R. Colombari and R. Gendler ➡️ apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap19031... 🔭 🧪 #science #universe #extragalactic #astronomy 1/5

🧵 Here's Ellen Harding Baker's "Solar System" quilt.🧪 This is the story.🔭 Back in 1876, an Iowa mom with 7 kids, E. H. Baker, decided that cooking & raising children wasn’t enough for her. She started working on a wool quilt showing the solar system. americanhistory.si.edu/collections/... 1/7

🧵 This new magnificent image, showing a pillar of gas & dust in the Eagle Nebula (M16), is part of Hubble’s 35th anniversary recent celebrations, which include revisiting some of its most iconic subjects. ➡️ esahubble.org/news/heic2507/ Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, K. Noll 🔭 🧪 #science #space #HST

🧵 Breathtaking! Here's the oldest film of a solar eclipse, restored and released online. On 28 May 1900, magician, astronomer and filmmaker Nevil Maskelyne used a special adapter to film the astronomical event in North Carolina. Source: www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/o... 🔭 🧪 #Science

Interesting but I think off the mark. It presumes 26Al isn’t inherited from molecular cloud because rare inclusions have low 26Al/27Al and “predate” 26Al. But as cited PP7 chapter & Desch+2023 explain, it’s a chemical heterogeneity. 26Al was always there, no need to make it: arxiv.org/pdf/2307.07750

🧵 The first images from the NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory are here, and they are breathtaking! This spectacular image shows only a small section of total view of the Virgo Cluster, 55 Mly away. ONLY A SMALL SECTION! ➡️ noirlab.edu/public/image... 🔭 🧪 #RubinFirstLook #CaptureTheCosmos

🧵 In this gorgeous image, Lyman Insley captured the bright heart of the Rosette Nebula where lies NGC 2244 (Caldwell 50 or Satellite Cluster), an open cluster located some 5,200 ly away in Monoceros. ➡️ apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap23020... NGC 2244 consists of hot, blue stars denoting a young age 🔭 🧪

🧵 Here's Ellen Harding Baker's "Solar System" quilt.🧪 This is the story.🔭 Back in 1876, an Iowa mom with 7 kids, E. H. Baker, decided that cooking & raising children wasn’t enough for her. She started working on a wool quilt showing the solar system. americanhistory.si.edu/collections/... 1/7

Mind-blowing new paper just out! 🧪 A research team used #Gaia to create the most detailed 3D census to date of OB associations within ~1000 ly from the Sun. Result? 🔭 57 groups of massive stars — twice as many as we knew before — that were born together and are now slowly drifting apart. 1/4

🧵 The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) is like a snapshot of the newborn universe, taken 380,000 years after the Big Bang. It is a key piece of evidence for the standard cosmological model (ΛCDM), but a new study suggests that part of this signal... ➡️ uni-bonn.de/en/news/087-... 🔭 🧪 #cosmology

🧵 In a 2024 paper, researchers led by Ralf Konietzka reported they determined that the Radcliffe Wave is indeed moving like a traveling wave. ➡️ cfa.harvard.edu/news/radclif... What is the Radcliffe Wave? It is a colossal, wave-shaped chain of gaseous clouds stretching... 🔭 🧪 #cosmology #science

A couple of absolutely gorgeous (I think!) new views of Mars for you... These are processed mosaics of images taken by Perseverance yesterday... Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/S Atkinson

I've decided to spend some time on a quest that's likely to fail. I'm trying to start with the Standard Model of particle physics, ponder its patterns, and figure out *why* it's that way. www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zrp...

You’re 100% right, of course! My typo from binge-reading your paper: I meant “within ~1000 parsecs from the Sun”, not 1000 ly. Thanks for the correction! (Everyone: 1000 parsecs = ~3300 light years 😅)

Mind-blowing new paper just out! 🧪 A research team used #Gaia to create the most detailed 3D census to date of OB associations within ~1000 ly from the Sun. Result? 🔭 57 groups of massive stars — twice as many as we knew before — that were born together and are now slowly drifting apart. 1/4

🧵 Admire this fascinating JWST picture. The cluster MACSJ0159.2-0849, here featured, is a monster made of hundreds of galaxies, ~4.5 billion light-years away. But the real magic? This galaxy cluster works as a gigantic, natural magnifying glass. 🔭 🧪 #extragalactic #cosmology 1/7

Thank you! Exactly: Einstein’s “crazy idea” from 1916 is now our best zoom lens for the baby Universe. With #JWST + these natural cosmic telescopes we’re literally watching the first galaxies switch on the lights.🔭 Mind-blowing how a century-old theory keeps opening new windows to the past! 🧪

🧵 Admire this fascinating JWST picture. The cluster MACSJ0159.2-0849, here featured, is a monster made of hundreds of galaxies, ~4.5 billion light-years away. But the real magic? This galaxy cluster works as a gigantic, natural magnifying glass. 🔭 🧪 #extragalactic #cosmology 1/7

Admire this fantastic pic, dominated by the diffuse blue light of the M78 nebula. Igor Chekalin, by processing the raw data for the original image uncovered in ESO's archives, claimed first prize in the ESO's Hidden Treasures 2010 contest with his final work. ➡️ www.eso.org/public/news/... 🔭 🧪 1/9

Admire this fantastic pic, dominated by the diffuse blue light of the M78 nebula. Igor Chekalin, by processing the raw data for the original image uncovered in ESO's archives, claimed first prize in the ESO's Hidden Treasures 2010 contest with his final work. ➡️ www.eso.org/public/news/... 🔭 🧪 1/9

Another stunning Martian sunset! (I reiterate what I wrote in another post a few days ago.) Fine dust strongly scatters red light away in all directions (Mie scattering). At sunset, when the Sun is low, its light travels hundreds of km through the dusty Martian atmosphere— almost... 🔭 🧪 1/2