There’s a telescope 3.5km down at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea. It’s called KM3NeT because it’s spread over a cubic kilometre of seawater. It isn’t looking for starlight, but faint blue flashes caused by passing neutrinos. Image: KM3NeT #astronomy

Two men with metal detectors entered a German forest in 1999. They weren’t archaeologists, but looters. Their illicit find would become one of the most important astronomical artefacts ever discovered. 🧵 (1/8) #astronomy #history Image: Frank Vincentz

Saturn has aurorae too. They’re powered by the solar wind and Saturn’s immense magnetic field, producing vast glowing ovals around the poles far larger than anything Earth can manage. Credit: ESA/Hubble, NASA & L. Lamy (Observatoire de Paris) #astronomy

A photo of the Earth and Moon from 114 million miles away. That’s farther than our average distance from the Sun. It was taken by the MESSENGER Mercury probe in 2010. Credit: MESSENGER/NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington #astronomy

You could place Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn side by side inside the Sun’s core… …and still have room to spare. And that’s probably the least impressive thing about it. 🧵 (1/6) Image: Image Editor #astronomy

In space, you can’t dry a wet towel simply by squeezing it. Without the normal role of gravity, the water just stays where it is. #astronomy #space

See that enormous crater on Mars’s moon Phobos? It isn’t named after the man who discovered the moon. It’s named after his wife. Here’s the remarkable story of how that happened. (1/6) Image: ESA #astronomy #history

The first living creatures to orbit the Moon were not humans. They were tortoises. #astronomy #history

Astronaut Scott Kelly once dressed up in a gorilla costume and chased Tim Peake around the International Space Station. He also hid in another astronaut’s sleeping quarters and jumped out on them. #astronomy #spacehistory

The Sun spitting out a mountain’s worth of material at over a million miles per hour. A Coronal Mass Ejection. At the height of its activity cycle, the Sun unleashes two or three of these every day. Credit: NASA/SDO #astronomy

Phobos skimming above Mars, but watch closely. Beneath the moon, a dust storm is raging at the foot of the giant volcano Pavonis Mons. Credit: Credit: ESA/DLR/FUBerlin/ @andrealuck.bsky.social CC BY #astronomy

Ganymede casts a mighty shadow across Jupiter. It’s the solar system’s largest moon - bigger even than the planet Mercury. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/T Thomopoulos #astronomy

Some of Saturn’s moons sculpt its rings with gravity. Here’s Prometheus (right) dragging ripples through the F ring as it passes. Image: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute #astronomy

NASA’s DSCOVR satellite caught the Moon photobombing the Earth from a distance of a million miles. That’s about four times farther away than the Moon itself. #astronomy Credit: NASA/NOAA

In 1835, New Yorkers opened their newspapers to claims of man-bats and biped beavers living on the Moon. It became one of the most successful hoaxes in publishing history. #astronomy #history

Sunsets on Mars are blue… … and it’s the daytime sky that’s red. All because of the fine dust in the Martian atmosphere scattering sunlight differently to here on Earth. Image: NASA’s Curiosity Rover #astronomy

A comet skimming perilously close to the Sun. Its tails bend as the solar wind and sunlight sweep them outward. #astronomy Image: SOHO

A sugar cube of white dwarf material weighs as much as an elephant… … yet they’re still the lightest kind of dead star. Image: Caltech #astronomy

Two space-grown tomatoes went missing on the International Space Station for eight whole months. Astronaut Frank Rubio was accused of secretly eating them, before they were found in a ziplock bag that had accidentally floated away. #astronomy #spacehistory

Most of the gold in the universe was forged in the fire of neutron star collisions. Your jewelry came from a cosmic car crash. Image: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/CI Lab #astronomy

Some black holes could be as light as a paperclip. They’re called primordial black holes and may have formed in the first second after the Big Bang. #astrophysics #astronomy

NASA scientists get to name rocks on Mars without many rules. That's why the Red Planet now includes: 🪨 Scooby Doo 🪨 SpongeBob 🪨 Yogi 🪨 Piglet Image = Yogi (Credit NASA/JPL/Dr. Timothy Parker) #astronomy #planetaryscience

King Tut was buried with a mysterious dagger - its metal older than Earth itself. It didn’t come from a mine or a forge. Discover what it’s made from and how it ended up in the tomb of a boy king. #astronomy #history

Sunlight is 170,000 years old. That’s the average time it takes to trickle from the core of the Sun to its surface. Today’s sunshine was made long before cave art, agriculture and the written word. #astronomy #science

You’ve invented a time machine. Grabbing a lightbulb, you head back to 1879 to show Thomas Edison. He’s so impressed, he steals the bulb & claims the invention. The twist? You didn’t invent it. Neither did he. So who did…? #physics #science

Gallifrey & the TARDIS are real. Charon, Pluto's moon, has a region called Gallifrey Macula. You’ll also find Tardis Chasma there too. Not a bow-tie, fez or fish fingers & custard in sight though… (I’m an 11 fan). #astronomy #DoctorWho Image: NASA/BBC

Someone cut off Galileo’s middle finger. Today it stands upright in a glass egg in Florence as one of the strangest relics in the #history of #astronomy.

You’re not supposed to name stars after yourself. But in 1814, Nicolaus Venator did by… spelling his name backwards. That’s how we got the stars Sualocin and Rotanev. Nobody noticed until it was too late. #astronomy #history

This is fun. Was shooting the horsehead last night and caught a meteor neatly bisecting Alnitak. #astrophotography

The Curiosity rover is leaving a secret message in the Martian dust. Its wheels are stamped with a repeating pattern of dots and dashes, spelling out “JPL” in Morse code. A quiet Easter egg from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Credit: NASA #astronomy #spaceexploration

Right now there are three aluminium Lego figures orbiting around Jupiter aboard the Juno spacecraft. They represent the goddess Juno, the god Jupiter and the astronomer Galileo. Unlike ordinary LEGO figures, they have no movable parts. #astronomy #space Image: NASA/Lego

In 1972, a Venezuelan farmer found one of his cows dead - its neck & shoulder shattered. It was blamed on a falling boulder, which was kept as a doorstop. It was really a meteorite - the only case of a lethal modern space rock. open.substack.com/pub/colinstu... Image: Christie’s #astronomy

When engineers began designing Solar Orbiter, they faced an unusual problem. Its heat shield would have to withstand temperatures above 500°C. The solution turned out to be something deeply unexpected: a coating made from burnt and powdered animal bones. #astronomy #space Image: ESA

We’ve been fascinated by the night sky for so long that Ice Age artists may have drawn star clusters on cave walls. open.substack.com/pub/colinstu... #astronomy #prehistory