You HAVE to watch this video! They've developed adaptive optics for a solar telescope in California. That means they can adjust for all the wiggle and wobble of the air above the telescope, so they've been able to capture images as sharp as if the telescope were in space. STUNNNNNING!!! Plasma rain!

Pranav Satheesh reports for @astrobites.bsky.social on a new method being used to explore the relationship between the mass of a supermassive black hole and the properties of the galaxy it inhabits. aasnova.org/2025/06/03/j... 🔭

Anyone remotely interested in #cosmology, #evolution, or #philosophy should read this deeply insightful, highly entertaining, beautifully written post by Julian Gough @juliangough.bsky.social, who's taken cosmological natural selection (originally by Dr. Lee Smolin) to a new, fascinating level.

Yes, that would be pretty much my take on this. If our universe evolved, then the laws of physics will be fine-tuned for an outcome. They won’t be symmetrical or beautiful in themselves, just as a tiger’s genes aren’t beautiful in themselves. The beauty is in the outcome: the tiger, the universe.

Well, Blowtorch Theory is currently number one on Hacker News for some reason, and getting the usual grumpy reaction you’d expect from those guys. Feel free to join in and tell them they’re wrong! news.ycombinator.com

So great to see @juliangough.bsky.social's This Lake Is Fake (brilliantly illustrated by the peerless Jim Field) shortlisted for the Alligator's Mouth Award. www.bookbrunch.co.uk/page/article...

Biology is the first half of the periodic table coming to life. Technology is the second half of the periodic table coming to life.

Hopping on my bike to come home.

I wrote a piece about children's books for the Irish Times that may interest parents. It's a deep dive into an invisible problem with children’s books, that makes it unnecessarily hard for kids to start reading on their own. www.irishtimes.com/culture/book... I hope you like the piece.

@seanmcarroll.bsky.social Ah! You're on here, too. (I signed up a while ago, but have only just started exploring.) I do enjoy your podcast, though we would probably have a few philosophical disagreements (but that just keeps it interesting). I may bother you with some questions at some point...

@runningastronomer.bsky.social I do like faint galaxies. Would love to talk to you sometime about the little red dots that the James Webb Space Telescope keeps finding in the background of everything. (My theory: extremely early AGNs, but I'd love your better-informed take.)

@drbecky.bsky.social Lovely to see you here! I've greatly enjoyed some of your videos. I might ask you a few questions about black holes sometime, if that's OK. (They feature rather a lot in the book I am currently writing.)

The more I dig into the history of dark-matter-as-theory, the more irritated I get. The Bullet Cluster? Evidence for collisionless dark matter. Great. Abell 3827? Evidence for self-interacting dark matter. Fantastic. Both “support” dark matter – even though they point in opposite directions.

Not more rapidly than @juliangough.bsky.social expected, theeggandtherock.com strikes again 😀

I processed my emotions, and now I’m worried that one day they’re going to discover that processed emotions give you cancer.

We just passed 100 people signed up to post in the Astronomy feed! 🔭🥳 It's really cool to see the astronomy community on Bluesky growing so quickly! Please reskeet this post - let's get more people subscribed and/or signed up to the feed!

My favourite fact about Iceland is that we have many, many crime writers but only one forensic pathologist, and he was so busy answering all of their questions that he decided to have a small seminar for writers to get some peace. It immediately sold out so he had another one that also sold out.

New arrival. Not sure how to meet people here. Maybe an introductory post? I write books, mostly novels & children’s books. I wrote the ending to Minecraft (the End Poem), & recently put it in the public domain. I’m writing a non-fiction book about the universe, called The Egg and the Rock. Um… hi!