People tend to take the Moon for granted, but it can be a source of constant wonder. It shaped life on Earth, it helped validate Einstein's general relativity, and it still flashes with constant meteor strikes. My latest Invisible Universe column: 🧪🔭 invisibleuniverse.substack.com/p/its-strang...

"What is the point of space travel?" Folks out there have questions. I have answers (or some strong thoughts, at least). 🧪 www.quora.com/What-is-the-...

Many stars shine. Some explode. And, in very rare cases, a star can HALF-explode. The nebula Pa 30 is the result of a half-exploded star. Its zombie corpse keeps energizing it, creating a firework shape that closely resembles a high-altitude nuclear explosion (right). 🧪🔭 arxiv.org/abs/2512.03140

Radio engineer, amateur astronomer, and Chicagoan Grote Reber was born #OTD in 1911. After reading about Karl Jansky’s accidental discovery of galactic radio emissions, he built a 9m radio telescope *in his back yard* and carried out the first radio survey of the sky. 🧪 ⚛️ 🔭 📡 Image: NRAO

Phobos hovering over the giant volcanoes of Mars! Fabulous view from ESA's Mars Express orbiters. Phobos is the 25 km (15 mile) wide flying grey rock at center. The volcanoes are (l-r) Arsia Mons, Pavonis Mons, and Ascraeus Mons. Processing by Andrea Luck. 🧪🔭 www.flickr.com/photos/19227...

There are now four flying saucers circling the Earth. They arrived on Thursday, when a NASA-funded program launched these experimental DiskSats. They have a versatile, standardized form that could simplify a wide variety of science & tech missions. (Illo below) 🧪 aerospace.org/kickstage/su...

Asteroid collisions spotted around another star! Twice over the past two decades, the Hubble telescope saw new dust clouds around the star Fomalhaut. They're probably places where large rocks crashed into each other in a young, forming planetary system. 🧪🔭 news.berkeley.edu/2025/12/18/a...

Wow! Not only can we see the disks where planets are being born around young stars, now we can sense the pull of the worlds taking shape within. Blue ovals show orbits of 31 newfound stellar companions. Bottom right: a simulation of our solar system at the same age. 🔭🧪 www.esa.int/ESA_Multimed...

Some plants generate their own heat to attract warmth-seeking pollinators. Heat-guided pollination may be an ancient trick that predates scent & color as a way to help plants reproduce. Amazing what you see when you look at the world in thermal vision. 🧪 news.harvard.edu/gazette/stor...

‪ “This is a shocking betrayal that tears out the core of American scientific prominence," said Pamitha Weerasinghe of @usacompetes.bsky.social. To help #SaveNCAR, read our update below & visit this page, where you can find email & call scripts to share with your reps. agu.quorum.us/campaign/151...

What's causing these weird blue flashes in the sky? A new study suggests an extreme explanation: The most recent flash probably came from a giant star, 10x the mass of the Sun, being completely consumed by a black hole in just a few days. Ulp. 🧪🔭 noirlab.edu/public/news/...

The universe is constantly remaking itself. Here, for the first time, we clearly see how exploding stars fill space with the element potassium. Some of that potassium ended up in you, where it enables your heartbeat & signaling between your cells. 🧪🔭 science.nasa.gov/missions/xri...

I could use some light in this darkness right now, so I thought I'd share a gorgeous image from JWST. This cosmic butterfly is a star being born. New planets are forming within the vertical dark line. Galaxies shine through the scene from the far distance. 🧪🔭 esawebb.org/images/potm2...

The number of active satellites in orbit has now passed the 14000 mark according to my estimates:

New images of interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS are coming in! This one, from the Gemini North observatory, was taken a couple weeks ago but just released today. The green glow is probably due to emission from diatomic carbon. 🧪🔭 noirlab.edu/public/news/...

New results are in from the huge, underground LZ experiment: We really, really, really have not found dark matter. LZ is so sensitive that it can see neutrinos! But still no sign of the hypothetical WIMP dark matter it was designed to detect. 🔭🧪 sanfordlab.org/news/lz-sets...

And on humanity's visionary side: Not only can we see neutrinos, we can now measure their spectrum. In essence, we can see neutrinos in *color* and start to track down the cosmic sources that create them. 🔭🧪 www.science.org/content/arti...

One of NASA's new PUNCH satellites got smacked by a micrometeorite. You can see bits of debris flying off at bottom left! Fortunately, PUNCH is OK, continuing to monitor storms on the Sun. (The colors here indicate polarization of light in the Sun's corona.) 🧪🔭 punch.space.swri.edu/punch_news.p...

It's funny to read headlines (left) that we may have just "seen" dark matter. I covered similar claims, based on similar data from the same space telescope...in 2014 (right). Now, as then: interesting observation, but weak evidence of a dark matter signal. 🧪🔭 iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1...

The XRISM satellite has detected the x-ray glow of Comet 3I/ATLAS. This is the first time anyone has managed to obseve x-ray emission from an interstellar comet! (FYI: X-rays result from the comet interacting with the solar wind. No spaceships required.) 🔭🧪 www.xrism.jaxa.jp/en/topics/ne...

We knew it was going to be bad, but now we know how bad: A study of half a million stars shows that their planets rapidly vanish as the stars grow old and bloated. The planets may get shredded, evaporated, or (most likely) dragged by tides into a fiery death. 🧪🔭 warwick.ac.uk/news/pressre...

Spiral galaxies like our own are rare in the early universe, because they require quiet, stable conditions. But the discovery of "Alaknanda," a tidy spiral from 12.3 billion years ago, shows that there were pockets of calm even in the era of cosmic chaos. 🧪🔭 www.sciencedaily.com/releases/202...

Astronomers have discovered one of the largest spinning structures in the known universe. This "cosmic filament" is 50 million light years long & contains 100s of galaxies that seem to be rotating in alignment. It's part of an even greater web linking the cosmos. 🧪🔭 www.ox.ac.uk/news/2025-12...

Samples of Bennu, a primitive asteroid orbiting near Earth, contain some surprising ingredients: natural sugars, gummy polymers, and specks of stardust that are even older than our solar system. There's a lot of complex chemistry brewing in space! 🧪🔭 www.nasa.gov/missions/osi...

Early Earth may have rained down naturally produced sulfur-containing biomolecules, such as the amino acid cysteine. It's an obscure-sounding result with big implications for the origin of life on Earth (and maybe many other planets). 🧪🔭 www.colorado.edu/today/2025/1...

More evidence that Mars has a colorful history. In the past, the Red Planet probably had rings at certain times, and a larger moon (or moons) at others. In the future, Mars will probably have rings again. 🧪🔭 eos.org/articles/sed...

China's huge JUNO neutrino detector turned on three months ago, and has already achieved new levels of sensitivity in studying these mysterious particles. The detector weighs 20,000 tons & contains 45,000 sensors watching for rare neutrino interactions. 🧪🔭 www.prisma.uni-mainz.de/outreach/pre...

New set of outer planet portraits! Images by JWST, processing by Andrea Luck. 🧪🔭

NASA's OSIRIS-APEX just flew past Earth, making a course adjustment to asteroid Apophis in 2029. Apophis will come very close to us that year & could hit in the future. OSIRIS-APEX will tell us a lot about Apophis...assuming the mission survives budget cuts. 🔭🧪 news.arizona.edu/news/osiris-...

Looking for good news, I found this: If you were struck by a microscopic black hole, the mass of a small asteroid, it'd be no worse than a gunshot. And such black holes are definitely too rare to have "any observable effects on the human population." 🔭🧪 www.sciencealert.com/what-if-a-ti...

Look at little Mercury racing in front of the Sun! (Sped up quite a bit; the actual transit took about 5 hours.)

It's been 4.5 billion years since protoplanet Theia (probably) collided with Earth & created the Moon. But chemical traces make it possible to study the attacker. It seems Theia was a neighbor from the inner solar system--possibly forming right alongside Earth. 🧪🔭 www.mps.mpg.de/theia-and-ea...

A 6-year survey mapped the biggest structures in the universe. The results are beautiful...and, annoyingly, they fit nicely with the current model of cosmology. We know there's something missing from that model, but figuring out *what* is not easy! 🧪🔭 news.uchicago.edu/story/scient...

It's Friday, and apparently bluesky is ready for this fun revelation: Dinosaurs lived on the other side the Galaxy.

A metaphor for holiday family gatherings? By studying relationships between distant objects, astronomers have reconstructed our solar system's early upbringing. Their conclusion: The Sun left its birthplace early, before its siblings could stir up much trouble. 🧪🔭 aasnova.org/2025/11/14/t...

One of the most exciting discoveries from JWST is "Little Red Dots": ultra-distant galaxies rapidly forming new stars & spawning a giant black hole They tell us that galaxies grew up a lot faster than we thought. We don't know how--but new observations offer clues. 🧪🔭 esawebb.org/news/weic2522/

The sky is a blank slate for us to project images buried deep in our minds. I look at this gorgeous new JWST image & see a human embryo. (It's actually two dying stars circling each other, casting out shells of dust. Which is a pretty cool image, too.) 🧪🔭 science.nasa.gov/missions/web...

NASA's newly released images of interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS come from across the solar system: Mars surface, Mars orbit, and the L1 point. They are dividends from investing in exploration & pushing the bounds of knowledge. 🧪🔭 science.nasa.gov/solar-system...

The crests of two ridges to the west and northwest of the Mars Perseverance Rover. Imaged using MastCam-Z yesterday on Sol 1687. flic.kr/p/2rGnEUB flic.kr/p/2rGmsw9

3 years ago, NASA crashed the DART spacecraft into an asteroid at 22,000 kilometers per hour. The event changed the asteroid's orbit and tilt & sent it tumbling. A nearby cubesat captured these remarkable images of the asteroid immediately after the impact. 🧪🔭 aasnova.org/2025/11/03/s...

The evolution of life is intimately linked with the pulse of our planet. A new geophysical models shows that the breakup of an ancient super-continent called Nuna may created the conditions that led to the first complex living cells. 🧪🔭 www.sydney.edu.au/news-opinion...

Today I learned: There are more unspent pennies in the United States than there are stars in the Milky Way. 🧪 www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2025/...

Marvelous new image of interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS, taken by photographer Satoru Murata before dawn this morning. On the right you can also see galaxy NGC 4691. There should be a lot more pictures coming in soon. 🧪🔭 www.facebook.com/groups/22700...

I will never get tired of watching meteorites blast new craters on the Moon. This likely lunar impact flash appeared today. Like a space firefly. 🧪

NASA's just-launched ESCAPADE mission is trying out a novel trajectory to Mars, one that's slower but allows much more flexible launch dates. The flight path also provides a bonus science session at the L2 equilibrium point near Earth. 🧪🔭 skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-ne...

#3IATLAS update: we've just pinpointed the comet's path with 10 times more accuracy, using data from our #ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter spacecraft. 😎🧪🔭 www.esa.int/Space_Safety...

My apologies to all: That was an image of Comet K1 ATLAS, not Comet 3I/ATLAS. Sorry about my error. (That's what I get for posting as I'm running out for a beer.)

Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS is fragmenting on its way back out from the Sun. 🧪🔭 www.virtualtelescope.eu/2025/11/13/c...

New images of interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS are coming in as it moves out of the Sun's glare and (barely) back into view. This shot, by Michael Buechner and Frank Niebling, shows an intriguing anti-tail and a "smoking" tail. 🧪🔭 britastro.org/observations...

I find this remarkable: The Dresden Codex, one of the few surviving Mayan manuscripts, contains tables that give highly accurate timings of solar eclipses over more than 700 years, from 350 CE to the 12 century. 🧪🔭 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...