mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06
Elon Musk has already started plans to launch a million satellites.
Yes. A MILLION.
This is a colossally bad idea, and it's not too late to make your voice heard. I explain everything:
Did you know that NASA will be *flying* around on Saturn's ridiculously huge moon Titan… in less than TEN YEARS?
Yeah, Dragonfly is awesome.
I wrote this!
Need a break from the chaos and madness? Oh my, do I have a brain-melting JWST image for you. Behold, the Red Spider Nebula!
https://badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/the-red-spider-nebula-jwst-s-view-of-gorgeously-dying-star
In 1991, a subatomic particle traveling *just* under the speed of light — and I do mean "just" — slammed into Earth's atmosphere with the energy of a major league basebal pitch!
But... where did it come from? And how?
A thing I wrote:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/where-did-the-oh-my-god-particle-come-from/
The Psyche mission to a metal asteroid 🤘 is passing by Mars later this week and is already taking extremely cool photos.
https://badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/psyche-peeks-at-mars-before-a-gravitational-rendezvous
Hubble watches as a comet tears itself apart. Bonus: It was seen by accident!
https://badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/hubble-accidentally-catches-a-comet-tearing-itself-apart
Today, humans will fly around the moon.
So let's take a look at what they saw as they left our planet. It's… a lot. And it's amazing.
https://badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/view-from-a-height-the-earth-from-artemis-ii
🚀 🌔 🌍
History doesn't always mean the distant past. The woman who discovered what the universe is made of could have seen Star Wars.
https://badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/the-astronomer-who-discovered-what-the-universe-was-made-of
Elon Musk and the other techbros love to spout pithy aphorisms about humanity's future, as long as it feeds the insanely profitable ventures they own. But their understanding of the reality of it is shallow and superficial.
My own thoughts:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-the-kardashev-scale-and-can-we-climb-it/
Here's a fun thought: Does the TV show Star Trek exist in the Star Trek universe?
Probably not, but this raises a lot of cool questions to geek out over!
https://badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/does-scifi-exist-in-a-scifi-universe
🖖
[And yes, that's me in front of the ACTUAL ENTERPRISE MODEL USED IN TOS]
We keep talking about dark matter as if it's all one thing, but what if it… isn't?
https://badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/is-there-more-than-one-kind-of-dark-matter
Astronomers strike it rich with exoplanets: TEN THOUSAND new candiadte alien worlds found! If confirmed they'll *more than double* the number known!
https://badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/astronomers-find-over-ten-thousand-potential-new-exoplanets
Wanna go surfing on Saturn's moon Titan? The forecast calls for 40-meter waves of liquid methane that move slowly and freeze you death.
Cooooooooool.
So, on top of everything else bad about these zillion-constellation satellite swarms, the debris from them burning up is making the sky brighter.
https://badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/space-debris-is-hurting-us-in-another-way-making-the-sky-brighter
Take a break from all this and let your brain soak up the amazingness of the Sombrero Galaxy, the stunning result of several cosmic collisions.
[Also in this issue: will Andromeda really collide with us? The chance just went up.]
https://badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/the-spectacular-sombrero-galaxy
The universe could be filled with teeny-weeny black holes way smaller than protons! Or not. But if so they might have exploded long ago! Unless they're like mountains.
Science is so damned cool.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-the-universe-swarming-with-tiny-black-holes/
A pulsar is one of the scariest objects in the universe, yet we keep finding planets orbiting them. Of course, any pulsar planet is gonna be weird… but still, here's an egg-shaped one that may once have been a star and got mostly eaten. So, yeah.
https://badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/an-egg-shaped-planet-orbits-a-death-star
As I enjoy doing, I present a cosmic distraction for you, and it's a doozy: a JWST shot of the spiral galaxy NGC 5134 is fire, I tell you. FIRE.
Just how massive can a star get? Pretty danged massive... but it depends on when you look. A thing I wrote for Scientiifc American, just like I do every Friday!
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/whats-the-most-massive-star-in-the-universe/
Today's BA Newsletter has an *INCREDIBLE* JWST image of Sharpless 2-305, a star-forming nebula that will crush your brain into subatomic dust (complimentary).
[my thanks to @markmccaughrean@mastodon.social for his help with this; he took the image!]
Cassiopeia's belly button is weird.
A solar eclipse seen… FROM SPACE?!
Yup. And it's an annular one, too, making it extra cool.
https://badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/solar-eclipse-seen-from-space
And oh yeah by the way a small galaxy may be ramming through the Milky Way too so I wrote about that because why not.
We've discovered over 6,000 alien worlds. But do these exoplanets have exomoons and exorings? Almost certainly! And we're allllllllmost there in discovering them, too.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-alien-exoplanets-have-exomoons-and-exorings/
So, have astronomers found a supermassive black hole blasted away from its galaxy and barrelling through intergalactic space... or is it just a weird galaxy?
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/have-astronomers-found-a-runaway-monster-black-hole/
Cool news: A new and very tiny satellite will stare at red dwarf stars to see if their planets get zapped by stellar flares.
Not so cool news: On top of sea level rise, some land is actually sinking.
https://badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/a-fun-not-really-twist-on-global-warming-land-sinking
[Premium subscribers only today!]
Looks like the moon is safe from a 2032 asteroid impact — unfortunately, kinda — and if you want to keep up with the changing sky, the Rubin Observatory will be happy to alert you millions of times per day.
Today's Bad Astronomy Newsletter covers a bunch of news from NASA's DART mission, which whacked an asteroid back in 2022. Very cool stuff including streaks on the asteroid moon's surface, the plume generated, and how the orbit of the binary pair changed!
If you throw a bit of coin my way you can read about the colorful shenanigans of an extragalactic red supergiant (one of the largest stars we know of) or how the sun fries little asteroids that get too close to it!
https://badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/a-red-supergiant-that-isn-t-yellow
Premium subscribers to my newsletter can read today about a gorgeous but weird galaxy that is not trying terribly hard to hide its cannibalistic tendencies.
https://badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/another-gorgeous-hubble-galaxy-but-it-has-many-secrets
Today's Bad Astro Newsletter for Premium subscribers: how do we know if a survey of cosmic objects is really catching them all? That can be hard to figure out, but critical to our understanding.
Need a place to go to get away from ? Paid subbies to my newsletter get a big ol' dose of the cosmos 3 times a week! Like today's issue about lightning on Mars, China may have already peaked its CO2 emission, and finding meteors seismically.
Premium subbies to my newsletter can watch the debris from a catastrophic supernova explosion expand before their eyes!
https://badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/watch-a-supernova-explosion-sweep-through-space
