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Bad Astronomy | An asteroid impact hit Antarctica 430,000 years ago

The material collected was found on Walnumfjellet, a peak in the Sør Rondane mountain range on the coast of Antarctica, about 4,000 km south of South Africa. This range of peaks reaches roughly 3,000 meters high, and the summits ice-free. Dating techniques show that the area the material came from has been exposed for at least 870,000 years.
Zoom In
Spherules about the width of a human hair found on a mountain in Antarctica tell a story of a large impact from a 100-meter wide asteroid some 430,000 years ago. Credit: Scott Peterson / micro-meteorites.com
The debris pieces found are called
impactites, minerals made upon impact. They're spherules some 100 to 300 microns wide (a human hair is about 100 microns in diameter, or about a tenth of a millimeter). When I first saw them I thought they resembled tektites, dark glassy material blasted off the ground in a big impact. The huge energy and heat released upon impact melt soil into glass, which gets thrown into the air, cools, and creates really cool spherules and double-lobed shapes (like bowling pins).

South-africa , Chelyabinsk , Chelyabinskaya-oblast , Russia , Antarctica , Scott-peterson , Mar-mark-garlick , Don-davis , Crash-course-astronomy , Dome-fuji , Bad-astronomy

Bad Astronomy | An astronomer has come up with a way to use the entire Earth as a telescope: The Terrascope

A lens bends the path light takes (this is called
refraction), so that a photon that would otherwise miss your camera gets directed into it. Again with a rain analogy: A raindrop that falls a meter away from you misses you, but if you could deflect (refract!) the path of that drop a little bit while it's still up high, it'll be aimed right at you, and you get wet.
In the case of the Terrascope, the lens is actually Earth's atmosphere. When light moves from one medium to another (like air to water, or space to air), its path bends a little bit. The amount it bends depends on the angle it enters and the stuff (what we usually call the

Phil-plait , David-kipping , Twitter , James-webb-space-telescope , Whole-earth , Turning-earth-into , James-tuttle-keane , Crash-course-astronomy , Bad-astronomy , Telescope , Earth , Space

Bad Astronomy | Universe expansion measurements show large discrepancies

Or, possibly, there’s a problem with how we’re observing it. Either way, something’s fishy.
In a nutshell, the Universe is expanding. There’s a whole bunch of different ways to measure that expansion. The good news is these methods all get
roughly the same number for it. The bad news is they don’t get
exactly the same number. One group of methods gets one number, and another group gets another number.
This discrepancy has been around awhile, and it’s not getting better. In fact, it’s getting worse (as astronomers like to say, there’s a growing tension between the methods). The big difference between the two groups is that one set of methods looks at relatively nearby things in the Universe, and the other looks at very distant ones. Either we’re doing something wrong, or the Universe is doing something different far away than it is near here.

Switzerland , Judy-schmidt , Edwin-hubble , Video-of-dark-energy , Big-bang , Crash-course-astronomy , Hubble-constant , Dominion-astrophysical-observatory , Atacama-cosmology-telescope , Dark-energy , Bad-astronomy , Universe

Bad Astronomy | A radio-loud quasar at the edge of the Universe hints at many more like it

Zoom In
What we see from an active galaxy depends in large part on our viewing geometry. If the jet is aimed at us we can see high-energy light like X-rays and gamma rays. If we see the dust torus edge-on it can block most of the high-energy stuff and we only see optical or infrared light. There's a whole menagerie of active galaxy types out there.
Quasars tend to have a lot of high-energy light (the first was discovered by its X-ray emission) and early on were also seen to be powerful sources of radio energy. But as we learned more we found that radio-loud quasars

Bill-saxton , Hubble-heritage-team-stsc , Milky-way , Hubble-heritage-team , Large-binocular-telescope , Very-large-array , Crash-course-astronomy , Bad-astronomy , Active-galaxies , Quasars , Supermassive-black-holes

Bad Astronomy | CG 12 is a weird but gorgeous blob of gas making lots of stars. Why?

Zoom In
The cometary globule CG12 and its embedded star cluster NGC 5367, taken using a 50-cm Chilescope telescope. Credit: Sebastian Voltmer
A great but peculiar example of these is Cometary Globule 12, or CG 12, which is about 2,200 light years from Earth. At first glance it's a classic of the genre, a kinda-sorta spherical glob loaded with a couple of hundred times the mass of the Sun's worth of gas and dust, and a long tail stretching away for several light years. It's creating stars inside it, and they form a cluster called NGC 5367.
But when you dig a little, you start finding weird stuff about it.

Sebastian-volmer , Cometary-globule , Milky-way , High-mass-stars , Crash-course-astronomy , Bad-astronomy , Nebula , Star-formation , Supernova , Science , செபாஸ்டியன்-வால்மர்

Bad Astronomy | Binary stars dominate space around the Sun

Zoom In
An artist’s map of the Milky Way galaxy, with a circle 3,000 light years in radius centered on the Sun. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Robert Hurt (SSC-Caltech) / Phil Plait (annotation)
Gaia is a European Space Agency mission that orbits the Sun in a stable position about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth. Its mission is to measure the positions, motions, colors, and other characteristics of over
nearly two billion stars in the galaxy. That's it. It doesn't specify what kind of star to look at (other than it has to be bright enough to see) or drill down to answer a specific question.

M-weissm-weiss , Alpha-centauri , European-space-agency , M-barstow-university-of-leicester , M-barstow-university-of-leicester-hubble , Milky-way , Robert-hurt , Phil-plait , Multiple-stars , Crash-course-astronomy , Bad-astronomy , Binary-star-system

Bad Astronomy | The most distant BL Lac object, or blazar, ever seen

Bad Astronomy | The most distant BL Lac object, or blazar, ever seen
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Gran-telescopio-canarias , Science-communication-lab-artist , Science-communication-lab , Science-communication , Crash-course-astronomy , கிரான்-தொலைநோக்கி-கனாரியாக்கள் , அறிவியல்-தொடர்பு-ஆய்வகம்-கலைஞர் , அறிவியல்-தொடர்பு-ஆய்வகம் , அறிவியல்-தொடர்பு , செயலிழப்பு-நிச்சயமாக-வானியல் ,

Bad Astronomy | Can a planet be bigger than its star? Yup. But it's not easy.

["Have we ever found an exoplanet that was larger than its host star? Is that possible?"]
My first reaction was, "Yes! Kinda." And then I thought about it a little more, and realized the answer is actually, "Yes! But if you mean a star like the Sun, it's unlikely."
Explaining it would be a bit much for Twitter, but as it happens I have a blog! So here's more about this.
That first reaction of
kinda was due to thinking about a white dwarf. This is the remnant of a star that was once like the Sun but died, shedding its outer layers and leaving only the core behind. That core — the white dwarf — is only about the size of the Earth. If the star had any planets bigger than Earth orbiting it before it died, it's possible that some will survive, and you get a planet bigger than its star. In fact we've seen a system like this, so yes, it can happen, and we're done. Easy peasy.

Cambridge , Cambridgeshire , United-kingdom , Cambridge-university , Goddard-space-flight-center , Twitter , Goddard-space-flight-center-nasa-jpl-caltech , Space-flight-center , Crash-course-astronomy , Bad-astronomy , Exoplanets

Bad Astronomy | The DESI 10-terapixel sky survey map has a billion galaxies in it.

trillion pixels, and makes up a
petabyte of data — a thousand terabytes, or a million gigabytes.
Oh, it also has over
a billion galaxies in it. A. Billion.
Like I said: Vast.
It's the result of the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys, maps of the sky made by the three observatories (the Dark Energy Camera Legacy Survey, the Beijing-Arizona Sky Survey, and the Mayall zband Legacy Survey, in combination with the orbiting WISE infrared observatory). They mapped the northern sky in seven colors, covering a third of the entire sky — 14,000 square degrees, or the equivalent area of 70,000 full Moons on the sky.

Beijing , China , Arizona , United-states , Dark-energy-camera-legacy , Arizona-sky , Dark-energy-spectroscopic-instrument , Imagining-surveys , Dark-energy-camera-legacy-survey , Beijing-arizona-sky-survey , Legacy-survey

Bad Astronomy | Martian New Year is on February 7 2021

It turns out this is based on science but is also somewhat arbitrary. I know that sounds like an oxymoron, but bear with me. This is fun.
Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun. On average it orbits about 228 million kilometers out, compared to 150 million for Earth. Because of that, it orbits more slowly and has a longer path to cover, so its year is longer than ours: about 687 (Earth) days compared to 365 and change for our planet.
Measuring the length of the Mars year is all fine and good, but when do you
start that measurement? What day do you choose as Day 1?

J-bell-cornell , Julius-caesar , European-space-agency , New-year , For-mars , Getty-images , Martian-new-year , European-space , Crash-course-astronomy , Mars-year , ஜு-மணி-கார்னெல் , ஜூலியஸ்-சீசர்