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altheredo.bsky.social
@altheredo.bsky.social
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stsci.edu
Astronomers have found a rare, ancient planetary system 145 light-years away, where a white dwarf star is actively consuming debris from a disrupted planet—the oldest and most “polluted” disk ever seen around such a star: https://bit.ly/47mYktj 🔭 🧪
At image center is a small, white star against a gray background. It is surrounded by a large translucent disk with rings and gaps that extends from upper left to lower right. In the foreground, irregular chunky rocks are floating in space along the bottom of the frame. A stream of material extends from lower right toward the central star. The words, artist’s concept are at lower left.
October 22, 2025 at 2:06 PM
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coreyspowell.bsky.social
Astronomers have determined that an elderly white dwarf star, 3 billion years into its final stage of life, is still busily crushing and devouring its planets.

Scientific data on the left. Artist's interpretation on the right. 🧪🔭

keckobservatory.org/white-dwarf/
Stellar spectrum showing pollution by heavy elements from a destroyed planet or asteroid. "Saturn Devouring His Son" by Francisco Goya
October 22, 2025 at 6:20 PM
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coreyspowell.bsky.social
You can read all about the amazing new Kilometer-Cube Neutrino Telescope (KM3NeT), located deep in the Mediterranean Sea, at the link below.

We can now see *neutrinos*, people! 🧪

www.km3net.org/km3-230213a/...
One module of KM3NeT with 31 light sensitive ‘eyes’ (called photomultiplier tubes) in the deep sea. The observatory which detected the ultra-high energy event (called KM3NeT/ARCA) had 378 of such modules installed at the time of the detection, on a total of 21 vertical detection lines attached to the sea bottom. The lines are at almost 100 meters distance from one another, and are almost 700 meters long. Altogether being a huge network of light sensitive ‘eyes’. Courtesy KM3NeT.
October 13, 2025 at 8:19 PM
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coreyspowell.bsky.social
An ultra-high-energy neutrino spotted by a detector in the Mediterranean Sea could be the result of an exploding black hole.

This is a highly speculative interpretation--but exactly the kind of far-out exploration made possible by new neutrino experiments. 🧪🔭

news.mit.edu/2025/could-p...
A simulation depicts a new high-energy neutrino’s detection by sensor strings rising from the Mediterranean seabed.
October 13, 2025 at 8:15 PM
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coreyspowell.bsky.social
What's out there in the universe? We don't know until we look.

The COWLS project scanned 42,000 galaxies and found hundreds of previously unknown gravitational lenses -- places where the pull of massive galaxies has warped space & bent starlight into arcs and rings. 🧪🔭

esawebb.org/images/potm2...
This ESA/Webb Picture of the Month shows eight stunning examples of gravitational lensing. Gravitational lensing, which was first predicted by Einstein, occurs because massive objects like galaxies and clusters of galaxies dramatically warp the fabric of spacetime. When a massive foreground object lines up just so with a background galaxy, the light from the background galaxy bends as it navigates the warped spacetime on its way to our telescopes. Depending on how perfect the alignment is, the light from the background galaxy can be bent into an arc, a circle (a phenomenon called an ‘Einstein ring’) or even split into multiple images.
October 8, 2025 at 10:53 PM
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coreyspowell.bsky.social
Astronomers have detected a dark blob of...something, billions of light years away. It's as massive as a million Suns & it emits no detectable radiation.

It might be a clump of dark matter, revealing new details about the structure of the invisible universe. 🧪🔭

www.ucdavis.edu/news/astrono...
Left, our best surface brightness model of the 1.7-GHz global VLBI observation used here, which has been reconvolved with the main lobe of the interferometer’s point spread function and added to the residuals (34 μJy per beam r.m.s.). For reference, red contours show the surface brightness at 2.1 μm observed by the W. M. Keck Observatory adaptive optics system30. The positions of two low-mass perturbers are each marked with a black X. The 2 × 108 M⊙ object first detected by ref. 24 is labelled , and the 1.13 × 106 M⊙ detection reported here is labelled . The zoomed-in region shown in the right-hand two panels is indicated by the black square, which has a side length of 60 mas. Top right, detail of the bright arc around , with the colour scale modified to emphasize the gap in the arc produced by the gravitational perturbation of . Bottom right, GI corrections to the lensing convergence (expressed in units of lens-plane surface mass density), showing a compact, positive feature whose position and mass are consistent with the independent parametric modelling results for . The dashed black circle has a radius of 80 pc and the lensed emission is indicated by the black contours.
October 9, 2025 at 4:16 PM
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coreyspowell.bsky.social
Meteorites striking the Moon release enough energy that we can see the flashes from Earth. The NELIOTA project has witnessed 193 of them (mapped here), creating a novel catalog of impact threats.

A new upgrade means we'll soon see a lot more. 🧪🔭

www.esa.int/Space_Safety...
This map reveals locations of lunar impact flashes detected by the NELIOTA project since 2017.
September 30, 2025 at 12:09 PM
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coreyspowell.bsky.social
Remarkable work from the team at the Event Horizon Telescope.

If you prefer your news in video form, here's a great summary of the new work showing magnetic changes around the supermassive black hole in galaxy M87, via @eso.org.

www.eso.org/public/video...
New images of M87's black hole show its changing magnetic field
New images of M87's black hole show its changing magnetic field
www.eso.org
September 16, 2025 at 5:35 PM
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pierpaolo.bsky.social
Lecco
Alba sul Lago di Como
September 13, 2025 at 5:24 AM
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coreyspowell.bsky.social
I'm looking away from our world for a moment.

I'm looking at the little dot in this image.

It's a newborn planet, 5 times the mass of Jupiter, carving a path through the disk of dust around its star. This is the first time we've seen the process clearly. 🧪🔭

www.eso.org/public/image...
What appears to be a ripple in space, is today’s Picture of the Week depicting a newborn planet eating its way through its dusty cradle as it orbits its host star. This image, taken with ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, is the first clear detection of a baby planet in a disc with multiple rings. These so-called protoplanetary discs surround young stars and appear as disc-shaped structures of gas and dust, often with rings like the one in this image. They are the birthplace of planets, and the rings are thought to indicate the presence of (hungry) planets in the disc. Initially, little particles in the spinning disc begin to accumulate and grow as gravity takes over, stealing more material from the native disc until they evolve into embryo planets.
August 27, 2025 at 4:49 PM
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giuliofirenze.bsky.social
Ondata di calore e temporali.

A partire da oggi e almeno fino al 17-18 agosto, l'Italia sarà interessata da un promontorio anticiclonico di matrice subtropicale desertica.
Le temperature risulteranno dai 4 ai 7 °C al di sopra delle medie. Attese massime fino a 38-40 °C nelle zone interne...1/7
August 8, 2025 at 7:32 AM
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lenorebeadsman.bsky.social
i defunti visitino i vivi

motivo per cui bisogna accoglierli e lasciare omaggi per placarne le ire
o per saldare gli eventuali debiti contratti in vita
July 29, 2025 at 12:57 PM
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coreyspowell.bsky.social
Extreme deep-sea organisms are closely related across the globe, indicating a previously unknown "superhighway" of migration via slow ocean currents.

Our planet is connected in all kinds of surprising ways. 🧪

www.csiro.au/en/news/All/...
Purple coral with a brittle star, which lives on the deep seafloor. Photographer: Karen Gowlett-Holmes. Source: CSIRO
July 29, 2025 at 12:24 PM
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drnereide.bsky.social
🧵
On 10 July 2024, the evidence of a rare, intermediate-mass black hole (IMBH) in Omega Centauri was announced.

On 18 July 2024, a study from a different research team announced that signs of an IMBH have been found in the IRS 13 star cluster, right near Sgr A*, the SMBH at the core

🔭 🧪 #galactic
"A multiwavelength view of the area of the supermassive black hole Sgr A* (yellow X). The stars are red, the dust blue. Many of the young stars in the cluster IRS13 are covered by dust or blinded by the bright stars."
July 21, 2025 at 8:33 PM
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coreyspowell.bsky.social
The very first step to making new planets is the formation of crystals of silicon monoxide. They stick together to build bigger & bigger things, until eventually planets emerge.

And now we've witnessed that step--the moment when a new planetary system is born. 🧪🔭

www.eso.org/public/news/...
This is HOPS-315, a baby star where astronomers have observed evidence for the earliest stages of planet formation. The image was taken with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), in which ESO is a partner. Together with data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), these observations show that hot minerals are beginning to solidify. In orange we see the distribution of carbon monoxide, blowing away from the star in a butterfly-shaped wind. In blue we see a narrow jet of silicon monoxide, also beaming away from the star. These gaseous winds and jets are common around baby stars like HOPS-315. Together the ALMA and JWST observations indicate that, in addition to these features, there is also a disc of gaseous silicon monoxide around the star that is condensing into solid silicates –– the first stages of planetary formation. Credit: ALMA(ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/M. McClure et al.
July 17, 2025 at 9:02 PM
Reposted
stsci.edu
NEWS: We may be witnessing the formation of a new supermassive black hole. #NASAWebb shows the Infinity Galaxy has a growing black hole between two galactic nuclei. It may have formed there through direct collapse of a gas cloud: webbtelescope.pub/4nQlWwI 🔭 🧪
A pair of distant galaxies that form the rough shape of an infinity symbol seen at roughly a 45-degree angle. Two overlapping, fuzzy rings with brighter blue patches are at upper right and lower left. At the center of each ring is a bright yellow blob, which is the nucleus. Where the two rings overlap on the left side, there is a mottled green patch of glowing gas midway between the two yellow nuclei. It is offset slightly to the left. Orange contours are overlaid on the galaxies. The contours are egg-shaped and centered on the green patch between the two galaxies.
July 15, 2025 at 2:06 PM
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coreyspowell.bsky.social
A recent buzz of gravitational waves revealed the most massive pair of merging black holes yet detected: 100 and 140x as heavy as the Sun.

They're so huge that they must have formed from earlier black-hole mergers, like soap bubbles combining. 🧪🔭

skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-ne...
Gravitational-wave astronomers have detected the collision of two beefy black holes, which created the most massive merger-made black hole found thus far. The event, GW231123, rippled through the two detectors of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) on November 23, 2023, during the first part of the facility’s fourth observing run. The signal was brief but loud, the cosmic equivalent of a thunderclap.
July 15, 2025 at 5:11 PM
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universal-sci.bsky.social
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us.

On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.

- Carl Sagan
July 10, 2025 at 7:23 PM
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coreyspowell.bsky.social
NASA's Parker Solar Probe made the closest-ever studies of the Sun -- and got this unprecedented look at multiple solar eruptions piling up on top of each other. 🧪🔭

science.nasa.gov/science-rese...
July 11, 2025 at 4:08 PM
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giuliofirenze.bsky.social
Sono a Vancouver Island.
Sulla costa occidentale dell'isola (zona caratterizzata da inverni non troppo freddi e molto umidi e da estati fresche) raggiunti i 21-22 °C, 4-5 °C superiori alle medie (Ucluelet). Quindi piacevolissimo, ma comunque più caldo del normale. Nell'entroterra dell'isola...1/2
July 2, 2025 at 5:03 AM
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fabiodebunker.bsky.social
Nel breve video potete ammirare la "comparsa" in cielo della nova V462 Lupi. Un evento inaspettato, scoperto il 12 giugno 2025 grazie al progetto ASAS‑SN dell'Ohio State University. Inizialmente aveva una magnitudine di +8,7 e, in pochi giorni, la sua luce...

1/4
June 24, 2025 at 9:11 PM
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tony873004.bsky.social
Newly-discovered #comet C/2025 K1 (Atlas) will be a northern hemisphere gem for much of the rest of the year, making 2 close approaches to Earth: 0.58 AU in August, and 0.40 AU in November.
May 29, 2025 at 9:55 PM
Reposted
coreyspowell.bsky.social
I recently visited the ALMA observatory in Chile. While I was poking around the telescopes, ALMA researchers released amazing new views of planet-forming disks around young stars.

These are the most detailed images yet of new solar systems being born. 🧪🔭

public.nrao.edu/news/exoalma/
Deep ALMA observations of 12CO emission from fifteen protoplanetary disks reveal a stunning range of structures in the gas morphology including gaps, rings and spirals. Credit: Richard Teague and the exoALMA Collaboration
May 22, 2025 at 3:46 AM
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coreyspowell.bsky.social
Something punched a celestial snake in the gut.

Radio images show the center of our galaxy is full of long, puzzling magnetic "snakes." This one has an unusual kink in it--apparently from where it was smacked by a pulsar racing by at nearly 1000 km/sec. 🧪🔭

chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2025/b...
This release features two composite images of a long, thin, cosmic structure. With the structure's vertical orientation, seemingly fragile dimensions, and pale grey color against the blackness of space, the images resemble medical X-rays of a long, thin, bone. The main image shows the structure in its entirety. The inset image is an annotated close-up highlighting an apparent fracture in the bone-like structure. The structure, called G359.13, or "The Snake", is a Galactic Center Filament. These filament formations are threaded by parallel magnetic fields, and spiraling, energized particles. The particles cause radio waves, which can be detected by radio arrays, in this case by the MeerKAT array in South Africa. In the first composite image, the largely straight filament stretches from the top to the bottom of the vertical frame. At each end of the grey filament is a hazy grey cloud. The only color in the image is neon blue, found in a few specks which dot the blackness surrounding the structure. The blue represents X-rays seen by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. In the annotated close-up, one such speck appears to be interacting with the structure itself. This is a fast-moving, rapidly spinning neutron star, otherwise known as a pulsar. Astronomers believe that this pulsar has struck the filament halfway down its length, distorting the magnetic field and radio signal. In both images, this distortion resembles a small break, or spur, in the bone-like filament.
May 9, 2025 at 5:46 PM
Reposted
operations.esa.int
A 495 kg Venus landing capsule, launched in 1972 by the Soviet Union, will undergo an uncontrolled atmospheric reentry this week.

Part of the Venera programme, the object, known as Cosmos-482, failed to escape low-Earth orbit and is now returning to its home planet 53 years after launch.
The Venera-4 spacecraft model at the Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics
May 5, 2025 at 1:48 PM