A lot of discoveries begin with "huh, that's weird." Astronomers noticed a weird dark patch at the center of this galaxy. Now it seems the void is caused by a record-breaking pair of ultramassive black holes that cleared out all the surrounding stars. 🧪🔭 www.sciencenews.org/article/larg...

It is ON! Japan & Europe are collaborating on Ramses, a mission to study asteroid Apophis as it makes a rare, unusually close pass by the Earth in April 2029. The Ramses spacecraft will study Apophis & see how it changes under the pull of Earth's gravity. 🧪🔭 www.esa.int/Space_Safety...

This is good fun for grabbing attention and generating clicks, but it's a path toward bottomless confusion. If every strange smudge and flare is a UFO, then my camera roll is full of UFOs. When I stand quickly I sometimes see squiggles in my vision. I don't know why. Are those UFOs, too? 🧪

Folks, amazing things are happening on the other side. Seamless pivot from "the Moon landings were fake and they hid it from us" to "the Moon landings were real and they hid it from us."

Today's big "UFO files" release consists entirely of old, familiar public documents. How old? One of the alleged just-declassified documents is an Apollo 17 transcript that was incorporated into a Daft Punk song 13 years ago. 🧪 www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbbT...

NASA has combined data from the greatest optical and x-ray observatories in space. The results are predictably spectacular. This is NGC 346, a cloud where newborn stars are bursting to life & shocking the nearby gas, creating a shimmer of x-rays (pink). 🔭🧪 chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2026/s...

From 2006-2024, the USMTArray project placed 1,700 sensors on a grid stretching across the U.S. Now we have the results of this exhaustive effort: a 3D map of the electrical architecture of the underlying crust, down to a depth of 60 kilometers. 🧪 agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/...

That's surprising: Astronomers discovered an atmosphere on 2002 XV93, a small world in the Kuiper Belt, out beyond Pluto Maybe the atmosphere comes from ice volcanoes or from a recent impact? Either way, it points to dynamic events in the cold outer solar system. 🧪🔭 www.nao.ac.jp/en/news/scie...

This is a valid perma link (the URL will change once it opens in your browser): eol.jsc.nasa.gov/SearchPhotos...

The Artemis II photo archive is amazing...but most of the links being passed around are broken. Here's a perma-link to the photos: eol.jsc.nasa.gov/SearchPhotos...

Amazing sequence of images from Artemis II. Look at all the action on and around the Earth: lightning, aurorae, satellites... Image processing via Riccardo Rossi. 🧪🔭

Astronomers have measured the power of a jet streaming from a black hole. The jet from Cygnus X-1 -- a black hole orbiting a massive blue star -- is 10,000 times as powerful as the whole Sun! (That's 10^37 ergs/sec.) And it's moving at 50% the speed of light. 🔭🧪 news.wisc.edu/scientists-m...

#MayTheFourthBeWithYou #ArtemisII

Does the existence of gastronomy imply the existence of gastrology? Because I might want in on that action.

Particle-collider experiments keep seeing anomalies that could point toward new physics...and they keep going away. This one might go away, too, but physicists at LHC are seeing an intriguing discrepancy in a process called "electroweak penguin decay." 🧪 theconversation.com/our-large-ha...

A wave of darkness is spreading across Mars. These images show dramatic changes to the Martian surface over the past 50 years, as volcanic dust blows through an ancient impact basin. 🧪🔭 www.esa.int/Science_Expl...

You know what would be a thousand times more inspiring? Keeping the Chandra X-ray Observatory alive & making sure we go back to explore Venus.

Time zones of the world. Humans are part empirical, part practical, part political, and a little weird. 🧪 brilliantmaps.com/time-zones/

"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe." --Carl Sagan You need stars & fusion to create the elements of cooking (and life). A new study shows that the universe started creating those elements more quickly than we knew. 🧪🔭 www.caltech.edu/about/news/y...

For your weekend enjoyment, here's a beautiful, expansive new view of the Sombrero Galaxy, courtesy of the 570-megapixel Dark Energy Camera on the Blanco Telescope in Chile. The galaxy's dark "brim" is a ring of dust and cold gas encircling a vast ball of stars. 🧪🔭 noirlab.edu/public/news/...

This story just keeps going: Giant octopuses of the Cretaceous were probably the top ocean predators of their day. They were up to 19 meters (60 feet) long, snacked on plesiosaurs and mosasaurs, and were probably quite intelligent. Sorry we missed you! 🧪 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

It’s Earth Day 🌎 If we are being realistic and honest - which really is the least we can do - it’s very likely warmer today than anytime in the last 120,000 years. And, the global warming rate the past century - and especially the last 30 years - is “exponentially”… 1/

For Hubble's 36 anniversary, NASA has released this image of the Trifid Nebula, a star-forming region in the constellation Sagittarius. It's a beautiful image, one that also calls up a lot of emotional history for me (a short thread). 🧪🔭 science.nasa.gov/missions/hub...

After all these years, we're are still learning fundamentally new things about the Sun & how it interacts with Earth. NASA's PUNCH mission is creating 3D "tomographic" maps of how solar eruptions blow past our planet & spread out through the solar system. 🧪🔭 punch.space.swri.edu/punch_news.p...

Goodnight Earth. Amazing.

Thought for the day: Earth is 10^30 times as dense as an averaged-out sample of the universe. That is, gravity has amplified the density of our planet by a factor of thousand billion billion billion. Without that amplification, we would not be here. 🧪🔭

Come on, the best dinosaur is Pachycephalosaurus. Lived 68 million years ago but was perfect for the modern world, with an 8-inch-thick skull.

Astronomers have discovered two supermassive black holes that seem headed for an imminent collision. These two black holes are so close that they could merge in just 100 years. And their radiation & jets changed dramatically over the course of a few days. 🧪🔭 www.mpifr-bonn.mpg.de/pressrelease...

Interesting update on NASA's proposal to send a nuclear-powered rocket to Mars. I'd sure love to see NASA release some information about the planned design of Space Reactor-1, along with the prospects for incorporating science into what is basically a planned technology demonstrator. 🧪

Comet R3 PanSTARRS is brightening in the morning sky & putting on quite a nice view. Still requires good binoculars and a very clear horizon...or you can enjoy the marvelous photos from those who are tracking the comet. (In this case, José Rodrigues) 🧪🔭 apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap26041...

The Artemis II crew observed six impact flashes from meteorites striking the Moon! The impacts appeared near the equatorial region & were most clearly seen while the Moon was eclipsing the Sun. No photos, unfortunately: The flashes happened too quickly. 🔭🧪 www.sciencealert.com/nasas-artemi...

Among Orbán's many corrosive effects in Hungary, he politically strangled universities and research funding. His defeat offers the possibility of a better, more open future for Hungarian science. 🧪 www.statnews.com/2025/09/02/h...

We have more details about NASA's planned Space Reactor-1, which will use nuclear-electric propulsion to travel to Mars. It will carry three Mars helicopters that will land via a novel "skyfall" technique. Science instruments on SR-1 are planned but TBD. 🔭🧪 www.science.org/content/arti...

A new study confirms the "Hubble tension": measurements of the local expansion of the universe do not line up with measurements of how the universe was expanding after the Big Bang. It's no simple experimental error. 11 different techniques agree. 🧪🔭 noirlab.edu/public/news/...

Science is good. We should fund it.

WELCOME HOME

Meanwhile on the water www.flickr.com/photos/nasah... #Artemis 🔭🧪

Earth moving really fast past the window now, swelling larger and larger

Just imagine looking out the window and seeing this. Or this. We are surrounded by cosmic beauty. Let's aim to live our lives to that standard. 🧪🔭 www.flickr.com/photos/nasa2...

Artemis II doesn’t reverse direction like its ground track implies. Far out, its motion is mostly radial (toward Earth), so its small eastward speed is slower than Earth’s rotation, so it appears to drift west. Closer in, tangential speed grows and overtakes Earth’s rotation, so it moves east.

Before modern mammals, there were mammal-like dicynodonts ("two dog tooths"). These beasties survived the Permian extinction & dominated the Triassic before the rise of dinosaurs. Now we know they laid large eggs--a key insight into mammal origins. 🧪 www.esrf.fr/home/news/ge...

I love that the "pter" in helicopter and the "pter" in pterodactyl are the same word. The names mean "spiral wing" and "wing finger" in Greek. HT @infinata.bsky.social

One is Pluto's moon Charon. One is Earth's moon, the Moon (aka Luna) A little shift in perspective, and even the most familiar objects in space look surprising and new. 🧪🔭

Solar eclipse + Earthshine on the Moon's night side + zodiacal light (interplanetary dust) to the left + Saturn and Mars at lower right. Oh, and that's the Orion spacecraft at left. Another iconic Artemis II photo. 🧪🔭 www.flickr.com/photos/nasa2...

One of my favorite Artemis II shots so far: a different kind of Earthrise. Double crescents! (Another difference: Strictly speaking, it is an Earthset.) 🧪🔭 www.flickr.com/photos/nasa2...

Beautiful shot & beautiful metaphor. The "Man in the Moon" drifting off at right. The lunar farside coming into view at left. (Processing: Damian Peach) From the evolution of the eye, ~500 million years ago, until October 7, 1959, no creature on Earth had ever seen the far side of the Moon. 🧪🔭

It is astonishing that humans are able to do these things. This is what happens when we act collectively to solve extremely difficult technical problems. (It works with many other kinds of problems, too.) You can follow Artemis II's encounter with the Moon starting at 1pm EDT. 🧪🔭 plus.nasa.gov

Depluralize a movie: 1: A Space Odyssey

The Moon is a major destination, a complex world in its own right. It is larger than any of the dwarf planets of the solar system! (All shown to scale here.) 🧪🔭 science.nasa.gov/moon/

The Artemis II crew is closing in on the Moon, getting an unearthly view: south at the top, lunar farside on the right. This is the first time humans have had a complete view of the huge Orientale impact basin, visible at far right. 🧪🔭 www.flickr.com/photos/nasa2...