Beta Pictoris (or just Beta Pic to its friends) is a fascinating star. It’s about 63 light-years away, so rather close in galactic terms, and has long been known to be an oddball. Even in the 1980s it was seen to be producing way too much infrared light—it’s a young star (about 23 million years old), part of a small group of relatively newly formed stars moving through space together. The extra infrared was likely due to dust and debris circling it, leftover from planetary formation, and warmed by the star.

In 1984 that disk was first seen, and it was a huge deal; the first time evidence of planetary formation was directly seen in an image. It’s been observed many times since, too.

Planets form from such disks, so could Beta Pic have planets? Yes! An exoplanet, Beta Pic b, was first announced in 2008, seen as a small dot near the star in images taken by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope. Turns out it was seen in images taken in 2003 as well, but missed because it was so faint and close to the star.

A second planet, Beta Pic c, was found in 2019. It wasn’t seen directly, but the effects of its gravity tugging on planet b were detected in data looking at planet b’s motion around the star. Planet c was seen in an image just a year later. 

And now a third planet has been found, and it’s a fun story: Two teams of astronomers independently discovered it nearly simultaneously!

Beta Pictoris d (arrowed) seen in the VLT images. Planet b is the brighter blob on the left. The star’s position is marked; it was subtracted from the image to make the fainter planets visible. Credit: ESO/B. Sutlieff, M. Bonse et al.

One team was looking at data taken using the Very Large Telescope in Chile, and spotted the planet in their images [link to journal paper]. To confirm it, they then looked at publicly available archived JWST observations, and spotted the planet there, too; in fact it was in VLT data from 2014! This means the planet was actually visible much earlier, but astronomers just missed it. It’s faint, only about 1% as bright as planet b, so it’s no surprise no one noticed it. The images are noisy, and it’s easy to mistake a planet for some random blob of light. 

The second team did the opposite, kinda: they were observing Beta Pic with JWST and saw the planet in their data. They then followed up with more observations to confirm it [link to journal paper]. Both teams acknowledge the other in their papers, which is nice. The work of the two teams complement each other in some ways.

Beta Pic d, like its siblings, is a gas giant, a big planet like Jupiter, though more massive — the first team find it’s about 2.4 times as massive, the second about 2 – 4, so that’s consistent.

It orbits the star at a distance of about four billion kilometers, which corresponds to between the orbits of Uranus and Neptune around the sun. Despite that, it’s hot, about 325°C (620°F). This is because it’s young. Planets form as material in the disk around the star clumps up, collecting together to grow. Eventually this protoplanet gets enough gravity to actively draw material in, and as its gravity strengthens the material impacts at higher velocity. Imagine a planet getting hit by a dinosaur-killer asteroid every five minutes for 10 million years and you can see why these young planets are hot.

Planet d takes roughly 90 years to orbit the star once, which is enough to detect that motion directly in the images, since the first were taken in 2014 and the most recent just last year in 2025.

Images of Beta Pic taken with VLT and JWST. Credit: ESO/B. Sutlieff, M. Bonse et al.

In the VLT images the bright star is subtracted during processing; in the JWST images it’s placed behind a small disk in the telescope to block its light. Those images are all to the same scale, and the planet is arrowed. The most recent image is at the upper left, and the oldest to the lower right. The motion is obvious enough (the bright blob in the top images above and to the left of the star is planet b).

Subscribers glow brightly in the infrared

I do so love brown dwarfs. These are a weird kind of astronomical object, with masses between that of a planet and a true star. They have characteristics of both but also of neither — they are more than a dozen times the mass of Jupiter, but aren’t really much bigger, so they’re very dense even though they have thick gaseous atmospheres. They don’t have sustained fusion in their cores like stars, but can temporarily fuse lighter elements like deuterium and lithium.

And they’re so faint they’re hard to detect, even when they’re nearby. Luhman-16 is a binary brown dwarf system (two orbiting each other) that was discovered only in 2013 despite being the third closest system to the sun!

Three brown dwarfs found in the star cluster NGC 6397. Left: column: JWST infrared images. Right: Hubble visible light images; in infrared the objects are much brighter and easier to spot, though it ain’t like it’s easy. Credit: Gerasimov et al. 2024 

Another issue with finding them is that they generally don’t glow much in visible wavelengths of light (the kind we see). Because they can’t generate energy in their cores, they tend to form and then cool off over time. As they do their emitted light reddens, until eventually most of the light they give off is in the infrared.

We know of about 2,900 brown dwarfs right now, some discovered in infrared surveys, others in observations by, say, JWST. In those cases their colors (different emitted wavelengths of infrared light) are used to nail them down.

But there are other ways. Because the ones we find are so dim, they tend to be close to the sun (within a couple of hundred light-years) or else they’d be too faint to detect. Like everything else in the Milky Way, they orbit the center of the galaxy, which means they move in the sky relative to more distant, background stars. If we take images sufficiently separated in time (a few years, say) then that motion (called proper motion) can be detected. The two images can be blinked one after another, for example, and the nearby objects will appear to flicker back and forth. Or, one image can be subtracted from the other; stars will more or less disappear, but anything moving enough will be seen as a pair of objects close together, one positive (white) and one negative (black).

That’s a lot of work. How do you do it? 

You ask a huge team of dedicated and enthusiastic volunteers to join in! That’s the point of citizen science^* : get lots of people to do small tasks that can then be combined to create a much larger wealth of knowledge. This has been a huge boon in astronomy, with many projects set up to help train non-scientists on the task, test their ability, and then let them loose on the data. Studies have shown the results tend to be really accurate, which is amazing. 

One such effort is Backyard Worlds: Planet 9, part of the much larger Zooniverse project. It uses observations from the venerable Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (or WISE) mission to find objects that have appeared to move over time. There have been thousands — yes thousands — of volunteers who have looked at the data, and there have been over 100,000 individual submissions of candidates (many of which overlap; that is, many people seeing the same target). This generates a huge database of observations, which is then examined by professional astronomers to see if they qualify for the catalog.

The upshot: the project has found 3,006 “motion-confirmed” brown dwarfs. Three thousand! That literally more than doubles the known number of these objects, a huge score [link to journal paper].

A big part of understanding a new kind of object is simply finding as many of them as you can. As you do, trends start to show up; how bright they are versus mass, for example, or their distribution in ages or distance. All of these tell you something about the greater population, and the more you have the better the statistics get, so you can be more certain you’re seeing real trend and not weird outliers (which is exactly what happened when the first exoplanets were discovered; the ones found first were the ones easiest to find — bigger ones with short orbits — which may not be representative of the whole collection).

Two images of Gliese 229A (the incredibly bright star in both) and the brown dwarf Gliese 229B (the fainter companion), now known itself to be a binary. The left image is from a ground-based 1.5-meter telescope; the right using Hubble Space Telescope. Credit: T. Nakajima (Caltech), S. Durrance (JHU); S. Kulkarni (Caltech), D.Golimowski (JHU) and NASA

Mind you, the first legit brown dwarf found — Teide 1 — was discovered only in 1994 and announced in ‘95! Another, Gleise 229b, was discovered that same year, and is now known to be a binary system of two brown dwarfs orbiting a red dwarf. I spent some time studying that one, which is a big reason I love these objects so much.

I’m very impressed by this new work. The science is amazing, and the addition to our knowledge of brown dwarfs hugely valuable. But it also shows — once again — that these kinds of crowdsourcing work very well, and make valuable contributions to our understanding of the universe.

You can be a part of it, too! Just go to the Zooniverse site and see what projects are open. SciStarter is a GREAT site that has tons of such projects across lots of different fields of science, not just astronomy. I wrote about them back in Issue 329 when I was on a NASA panel about these projects, too.

Who knows? Join up, and you might make a real contribution to real science.

^* I’ve been told this term is falling out of favor, since the word “citizen” is rather loaded. Fair enough, but the one I see being used more now is crowdsourcing, which, sure, but is a bit generic. It fits, though, so if it catches on, fine with me.

You can email me at thebadastronomer@gmail.com (though replies can take a while), and all my social media outlets are gathered together at about.me. Also, if you don’t already, please subscribe to this newsletter! And feel free to tell a friend or nine, too. Thanks!

Hey! Don’t forget that annual subscriptions are only $45 (a 25% discount) until Friday at noon! You can upgrade from a free or monthly subscription, or give a gift to a nerdy friend. Sign up here, please!

This newsletter is issue #1060, which seems like an unremarkable number, until you realize it’s equal to the sum of all the prime numbers between 1 and 100!

2 + 3 + 5 + 7 + 11 + 13 + 17 + 19 + 23 + 29 + 31 + 37 + 41 + 43 + 47 + 53 + 59 + 61 + 67 + 71+ 73 + 79 + 83 + 89 + 97 = 1060

So tautologically it’s literally remarkable since I’m remarking on it, but also that’s just kinda fun. Math is cool.

Let’s hope I make it to issue 76,127, which is the sum of all primes from 1 to 1000! I may employ a medium to dictate the newsletters by then.

It was a pretty good week for asteroids: the Japanese mission Hayabusa2 flew past Torifune, and the Chinese mission Tianwen-2 approached 2016 HO3, aka Kamo'oalewa, in preparation to take samples.

Torifune, seen by Hayabusa2. Credit: JAXA, The University of Tokyo, Chiba Institute of Technology, Tokyo University of Science, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Paris Observatory, Canary Islands Institute for Astrophysics

Torifune is a near-Earth asteroid about 450 meters end-to-end, and Hayabusa2 passed it at a distance of just 800 meters, an incredible precision given it was moving 5 kilometers per second! This was done to test such precise targeting, in case we ever need to whack an asteroid that is headed toward an Earth impact.

Torifune is weird, isn’t it? Except it really isn’t. It’s a double-lobed rubble pile, which we’re learning is actually a not uncommon shape for small asteroids. Rubble piles are literally that; collections of rocks of all sizes held together by their own gravity. If you stood on one and started throwing rocks off it, eventually there would be nothing left. That’s all it is.

There are competing ideas for how they get that peanut shape. A likely one is that it may have been more round at some point, then either suffered a big impact or spun itself up so much it started flinging away rocks (I think the latter is now considered unlikely). The material coalesced into two lumps, which then fell toward each other slowly and stuck together like two snowballs. The comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko looks very much like this, as do other small asteroids. Whatever mechanism makes them this way happens often. 

Hayabusa2 flew past Torifune never to return. The plan is for the spacecraft to meet up with the tiny 10(ish)-meter-wide asteroid 1998 KY26 in 2031.

Kamo'oalewa seen from only 20 km away. Credit: China National Space Administration

Kamo'oalewa is also a near-Earth asteroid (meaning it can get closer than about 45 million km from our planet), but is much smaller, only 27 meters long. Unlike Torifune, it looks more solid, almost like a shard of rock chipped off something bigger. Tianwen-2 is approaching it slowly, and will study the wee rock for about nine months. The plan is to retrieve samples from the surface and return them to Earth in 2027. From there the spacecraft will get a gravity assist from Earth to flyby the comet 311P/PanSTARRS sometime in the mid-2030s.

Kamo'oalewa is an odd one. It’s a quasi-satellite of Earth, meaning it has an orbit around the sun very similar to Earth’s, so from our point of view we see it following us, sometimes getting a bit closer and sometimes farther away on its elliptical orbit. The orbit is unusual, and some astronomers think it may very well be a chunk of the moon blasted into space by a big impact (maybe the one that created the crater Giordano Bruno). That would explain its appearance, too. We don’t know, but with Tianwen-2 studying so intently (and sending us a sample!) we’ll almost certainly know for sure in the coming years. 

The shot of the asteroid above was taken from 20 km away — it’s the smallest asteroid ever visited and imaged up close — so it’s not terribly sharp. However, the spacecraft will get much closer, so stay tuned for better images soon.

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If everything feels like it’s all going downhill today, there may be an astronomical reason for that: Today, July 6, 2026 is when Earth reaches aphelion^* , the farthest point from the sun on our planet’s slightly elliptical orbit. This happens at 13:30 Eastern (US) time, or 17:30 UT. Astronomers tend to measure distances using the centers of objects (the math works out best that way), and at that time the centers of Earth and the sun will be 152,087,774.4 km apart.

I got this number from the wonderful Astronomical Almanac site maintained by the US Naval Observatory; you can give it a body and a time and it will tell you all sorts of cool info. The distance page is here. Note it gives the answer in AU, or astronomical units, which is the average distance of Earth from the sun, defined as 149,597,870.7 km. So Earth will be 1.016643978 AU from the sun at that time, which you can see from the number itself is about 1.7% more than average.

As an astronomer I don’t generally celebrate aphelion, but as a newsletter writer why not use it as an excuse to have a subscription sale? So I will!

Starting today and running through Friday at noon (Eastern US time), annual premium subscriptions to this newsletter are discounted 25%, so they’re just $45 per year. Premium subscribers get three issues per week (on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday), no ads, and can also leave comments for any issue archived on the newsletter website.

This discount applies to all new subscriptions, or upgrades from free or monthly subscriptions (if you’re currently a monthly subscriber this’ll save you 27 bucks a year). Just go to the sign-up page, enter your email, and choose the annual option (if you’re giving this as a gift to someone, click the “gift” button just above that as well).

This discount will apply for one year, so when your subscription period is up it’ll revert back to the regular price.

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Thanks! And enjoy the rest of the orbit!

^* Pronounced ap-hee-lee-un, though I’ve sometimes seen it pronounced as aff-hee-lee-un, which I think is silly. The prefix is from apo meaning “away from” and the root word is helion for sun. So I think the keeping the hard p sound makes more sense, unless you’re some kind of meathead, pronounced mee-thed.

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TESS, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, was designed to find exoplanets orbiting nearby, bright stars. If we see the planet’s orbit edge-on, then once per orbit it partially eclipses the star, causing it to dim and brighten in a specific way. As of late May, 2026, TESS has found nearly 900 confirmed planets, and has over 8,000 candidates still to be confirmed. Impressive.

But a new planet was recently confirmed using TESS, but not at all in the usual way. This time, it was found via gravitational lensing.

This is an effect predicted by Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and confirmed. I’ve written about it oh so many times before: a massive object (called the lens) has gravity, which bends space. A photon from some object (called the source) behind the first one traveling through that space will follow the bend, like a car following a dip in a road. This has many possible effects: it can create multiple images of the source, or distort its image (if it’s, say, a galaxy), or magnify the image. It also, crucially, makes the source appear brighter, since photons that might otherwise miss us are focused toward us. It’s like piping rain into a bucket; the bucket fills faster.

This works for stars and even planets! Say a star that hosts a planet (the lensing system) is some distance away from Earth. If this system passes directly in front of a more distant star (the source) as seen from Earth, then the source star will appear to brighten in a characteristic way. It will even brighten twice; once due to the star’s gravity and another time due to the planet’s.

Mind you, the planet is far, far too faint to detect otherwise. It only reveals itself through its gravity.

The star in question (both stars are so close together in the sky they appear as one), shown by the red arrow. Credit: CDS / Aladin Lite

Well! In April 2023 the ESA Gaia mission reported a star getting brighter (which was part of its mission, detecting the brightness of over a billion stars). Given the designation Gaia23bra, it doubled in brightness very rapidly, in about a day. Interested, some astronomers dug into the TESS data archives, and found the star had been seen by that spacecraft as well [link to journal paper]. TESS observed the star every two minutes, which is a rapid enough cadence to really nail down the light curve, how the star brightened over time. Feeding that data into a well-tested set of programs that model gravitational lenses, they found the clear signature of a planet and star as the lens.

The source star is smaller and cooler than the sun, with about 90% the sun’s mass. It’s about 42,000 light-years away, which is nearly halfway across the galaxy! 

The lensing star is smaller yet, about 80% the sun’s mass. The planet, called Gaia23bra b, is about 1.6 times the mass of Jupiter, so roughly the same size as our solar system’s biggest planet. It orbits its host star at a distance of about 740 million kilometers, which is similar to Jupiter’s distance from the sun, too.

A graph showing the star brightness over time (shown in Julian Days; the tick marks are 20 days apart). The two peaks correspond to the lensing by the star and the planet. The blue points are Gaia observations, and yellow is TESS. The dashed line is a mathematical fit to the curve. Credit: Harris et al., 2026

Unsurprisingly, the star is located in the plane of our Milky Way. For this geometry to work, two stars have to pass extremely close together in the sky, so the chances of that go way up where there are lots more stars. Looking into the disk of the galaxy means looking through billions of stars (the only place where stars are denser is in the galactic core, which is where most gravitationally lensing planets have been found).

Interestingly, one of the main goals of the soon-to-be-launched Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is to look for gravitational lenses like this (technically called microlensing, since the more general term is reserved for when big objects like galaxies do the lensing). It will scan every 12 minutes or so for such events, slower than TESS does, so it may miss details in the light curve, but will get much more accurate brightnesses for the stars involved. So, together, Roman and TESS could make a mighty team for this sort of thing. 

At the moment, by far the majority of exoplanets found have used the transit method (the mini-eclipse way). Only a handful has been found by lensing, but that number should go way up soon. Roman is predicted to find hundreds of planets this way looking toward the Milky Way’s center. That’s extremely cool! It is due to launch in the fall, so we may be on the verge of a new explosion in exoplanet discoveries. Stay Tuned!

You can email me at thebadastronomer@gmail.com (though replies can take a while), and all my social media outlets are gathered together at about.me. Also, if you don’t already, please subscribe to this newsletter! And feel free to tell a friend or nine, too. Thanks!

Note: This Thursday issue would normally be only for Premium subscribers, but it’s an important topic so I’m sending the bulk of it to free subbies as well, with most of the info “above the fold”. Enjoy!

The largest survey of the sky ever undertaken has now begun. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s monster 8.4-meter telescope has opened its eye and is now taking routine images of the night sky.

Does that not sound like that big a deal? What if I tell you the camera it’s using has 3.2 billion pixels — yes, billion — and takes an image of the sky every 40 seconds? And that the patch of sky it sees in every image is a rough circle 50 times the area of the full moon on the sky? And it will scan the entire southern sky in about three nights, then repeat the process for many years?

Yeah. This will be a game changer.

The idea is to look for transients, objects that change in brightness and/or position. That includes asteroids, comets, trans-Neptunian objects, flaring black holes, stars just orbiting the Milky Way’s center, and much, much more. And it will do this with very keen eyesight indeed, with a resolution (the ability to split two objects very close together) of just 0.3 arcseconds, which is a very tiny amount: the human eye has a resolution of about 60 arcseconds. Hubble has a resolution of 0.05 arcseconds, and it’s in space where there’s no atmosphere to muck up the images. So Rubin has excellent vision.

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Astronomers already released some test images last year, and they were spectacular, but the difference now is that the telescope is automatically surveying the sky, taking image after image. These can then be compared to look for anything that changed. This has to be done by computers, of course; no human could possibly go through that much data. That is how it was done back in the day; in the late 1920 and early 30s Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto by blinking back and forth between two photographs of the night sky, looking for anything that moved. I’ve done this sort of thing as well, and it’s incredibly tedious.

Now try it for three billion pixels. Yeah.

This Rubin survey is called the Legacy Survey of Space and Time^* , and here’s the first release image from it: 

The first release from the LSST. Credit: NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory/NOIRLab/SLAC/AURA

I know, it just looks like a chunk of night sky, right? But that’s because I had to shrink it to a thousand pixels wide to fit this newsletter. The high-resolution image is — and I can hardly believe I’m writing this — 56,428 x 29,949 pixels. That’s 1.7 billion pixels. Holy moly. It’s a 9.4 gigabyte file, so it may take a while to download, too. I did, but it’s so big my ancient version of Photoshop gagged on it. I was able to get The GIMP to read a lower-res version (a mere 6.4 Gb) — barely — so I cropped out a tiny piece to display below. It’s actually over 3,000 pixels wide, but again I had to shrink it to fit here, so the original is actually far higher-resolution than this: 

A teeny tiny piece of the first release image from LSST. Credit: NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory/NOIRLab/SLAC/AURA

Yegads. So many stars! And galaxies! That feathery mist you see is what’s called galactic cirrus (it used to be called integrated flux nebula, which is more fun); extremely tenuous dust and gas that is illuminated by background starlight. That stuff is faint, and to see it so clearly here is a testament to the power of this survey.

There’s another aspect to this as well, which is not being covered as much, but was mentioned in the press release. It’s about how deep the images can get. By that astronomers mean how faint an object you can see in the images.

When you take a single image, even a long exposure, there’s a problem with noise. This has many sources, but it means fluctuations in the brightness of an image caused by a combination of random processes and internal issues with the camera. An exposure of a faint source, for example, might only get a few photons per second. That stream is not perfectly consistent, though. It might have 5 photons in the first second, but 3 in the next, then 10. That’s called photon noise, and for the super nerds among you it’s a Poissonian process. The fluctuations have a statistical relation, which goes by the square root of the number seen.

If you see, say, 100 photons total, then you expect a standard deviation of 10 photons, which means that the difference between seeing 90 and 110 photons isn’t statistically significant. But if you see 10,000 photons, the square root of that is 100, so in that case 9,900 and 10,100 photons is the expected random range seen, which is much tighter percentage-wise even though the numbers themselves are larger. So the <tl;dr> of this is, the more photons you get, the smaller the random fluctuations are, and the cleaner your image is. 

The folks at NOIRLab (who are the caretakers of the Rubin data) provided a nice example of this:

A comparison of a single image (left) with 80 (right). Credit: NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory/NOIRLab/SLAC/AURA

Premium subscribers are a great cosmic wind beneath my wings  

The Observer’s Notebook, a podcast by the Association of Lunar & Planetary Observers, kindly asked me to do an interview with them, and it’s now live!

Host Tim Robertson and I talked about my history with astronomy and skepticism, doing science movie reviews, misinformation, and what it takes to be an effective science communicator. It was fun, and I hope you give it a listen!

M82 is a relatively nearby galaxy, just 12 million light-years away (for comparison, the Andromeda galaxy, the nearest big spiral to our own, is 2.5 million light-years distant). It’s a weird thing: originally classified as an irregular galaxy — meaning one with no overall shape, just a mess — it’s now known to be a small spiral galaxy that we see nearly edge-on, making it look elongated, hence the nickname the Cigar Galaxy.

A new JWST image doesn’t really reinforce that name, though. Because ye GADS that’s not at all what I see in it:

M82, the (exploding) cigar galaxy. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, A. Smercina (STScI), T. Williams (University of Manchester). Image processing: A. Pagan (STScI).

Woof. An utterly spectacular high-resolution 15,000 x 10,000 pixel image is available as well, and yeah, you want it. It’s incredible.

What you’d think of as the main body of the galaxy itself is the white smear of light going horizontally across the image. That’s the combined light of billions of stars. Most are so close together that, from our distance, they just look like a continuous glow. However, JWST’s keen vision can resolve a lot of them, and in fact about 16.5 million individual stars can be seen in the original scientific data.

But what’s that stuff erupting out?

M82 is a starburst galaxy, one undergoing a highly fecund episode of star birth. On average, our Milky Way converts about 1 – 2 times the sun’s mass worth of gas into stars every year (low-mass stars are the most common, so this means stars are born at a rate of very roughly five per year). M82, despite being smaller than the Milky Way, has a star formation rate ten times higher! It’s likely that some time in the past it passed by its larger spiral neighbor M81, and the gravitational interaction shook M82, causing gas clouds to collide, collapse, and elevate its stellar birth rate.

Most of that occurs in the core of the galaxy. A fraction of these newborn stars are high mass (a dozen or more times the sun’s mass) and very luminous. They blow out an intense wind of material, especially when they start to die, which only lasts a few million years. As they swell up into red supergiants they blow huge clouds of carbon and silicon (together called dust) into space, which in visible light are opaque. However, in infrared light that glows, and the combined winds of millions of these stars create those two huge columns of material blowing outward, up and away from the galactic disk (images from the mid-20^th century made it look like the galaxy was exploding — like zillions of supernovae were occurring in the core — and a lot of scifi was based on that erroneous interpretation).

M82’s central region, where clusters of stars blow out tendrils of material, seen in an earlier image taken using JWST. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, A. Bolatto (UMD)

Most of these stars are forming in immense groups called super star clusters, containing hundreds of thousands of stars. An earlier JWST image from 2024 (which I wrote about in BAN #726) shows the winds blowing outward in tendrils from these clusters, which merge together farther away to form the two immense gales of material seen in the new image.

So it’s not so much the Cigar Galaxy, or even the Exploding Cigar Galaxy, but the Double-Headed Infrared Broccoli Galaxy. Well, it looks that way to me.

Hubble’s view of M82, also showing the gassy emission. Credit: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA). Acknowledgment: J. Gallagher (University of Wisconsin), M. Mountain (STScI) and P. Puxley (NSF). 

Hubble observed M82 as well in 2006. The tendrils are visible but not nearly as prominent; this image shows hydrogen gas glowing red, and there’s far more dust than gas in the winds so they’re not as prominent.

One thing that always gets to me in shots like these. The M in M82 stands for Messier; Charles Messier (MEZZ-yay, more or less) was a French comet hunter in the 18^th century. He kept finding faint fuzzies in the sky that interfered with his hunt, so he catalogued them as a way to avoid them. The Messier catalog is now a must-see list of objects (like clusters, nebulae, and galaxies) for amateur astronomers, those being among the biggest and brightest objects in the sky.

I’ve seen M82 myself in my own ‘scope, and in fact saw a supernova in it in 2014. M82 is small in a wide-field eyepiece, but with moderate magnification it’s not all that much different in apparent size than what you see in the JWST and Hubble images.

That blows me away. Those big ‘scopes have incredibly keen vision, so they can see details that are very small and invisible through smaller telescopes (the images you usually see are compressed, but the high-res version gives you a pretty good hint at the details available). Hubble and JWST generally have to take multiple images of larger objects, scanning them so astronomers can put together a mosaic that shows the whole thing.

That’s true here. The detail is incredible. Most distant galaxies are smaller in the sky, and lack the sharp structure we can see in nearer galaxies that appear bigger. Since Messier objects are among the biggest, you can always count on a jaw-dropping shot when JWST and Hubble take a peek at something that starts with that M. Whenever one of them shows up in my inbox I know I’m in for a treat. 

One I can’t wait to share with all y’all, too.

You can email me at thebadastronomer@gmail.com (though replies can take a while), and all my social media outlets are gathered together at about.me. Also, if you don’t already, please subscribe to this newsletter! And feel free to tell a friend or nine, too. Thanks!

Today’s issue number, 1054, doesn’t seem special in any way, yet is a number any astronomer will recognize immediately.

It’s the year the light from the Crab Nebula supernova explosion reached Earth.

The Crab is one of the most (and I do mean the most) iconic astronomical objects in the sky (heaven knows I’ve written about it enough times). It’s faint enough that you need a pretty good pair of binoculars to see it at all, but some structure becomes apparent with even a small telescope. And of course, with something like Hubble you get this sort of magnificence:

The ridiculously cool Crab Nebula. Credit: NASA, ESA and Allison Loll/Jeff Hester (Arizona State University). Acknowledgement: Davide De Martin (ESA/Hubble)

I mean, it looks like the expanding debris from a cosmic explosion. Because it is. A massive star ran out of fuel, and its core collapsed. This created a colossal explosion of energy that blasted away the star’s upper layers at soul-freezingly high speed… and mind you, we’re talking about 4.5 times the mass of the sun worth of gas, so an incredible amount. After nearly a thousand years of expansion the result is the Crab Nebula.

The collapsed core of the star became a super-dense neutron star, one of if not the best studied examples of its kind. The fierce radiation of the neutron star — technically a pulsar — also heats and excites the gas around it.

The star was so bright when it exploded that it was seen during the daytime from Earth despite being about 6,500 light-years away. It was recorded by Chinese astronomers, which is how we know that not only was it seen in 1054, but the date it was first noticed translates to July 4 now. So it’s almost the anniversary of that as well.

Happy birthday, Crab! You’ve been a huge help to astronomers; we’ve studied you to learn about supernovae, pulsars, the interstellar medium (gas between stars), stellar nucleosynthesis, X-ray emission from neutron stars, and so much more. We’ve even watched you grow over the years.

And for the jokes. Whenever I happen to see the time is 10:54, I say. “It’s Crab Nebula time!” to the point where my wife doesn’t even roll her eyes anymore when I do.

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I love brown dwarfs: objects more massive than planets, but lacking enough mass to ignite nuclear fusion in their cores to become true stars. Some people call them failed stars, but I reject that; they are their own beasts, and besides, it’s just as correct to call them extremely successful planets.

Anyway, they have masses between about 13 and 77 times Jupiter’s, and the first were discovered in the 1990s (I studied them for a while). Now we know of thousands, and JWST is finding more all the time.

They are commonly found as binaries, a brown dwarf (or BD) orbiting a normal star or another BD. In general they’re not terribly close together, with typical orbital periods of more than a year.

However, a team of astronomers went searching for BDs with far shorter orbital periods. Why? Because that means the pair would be very close together, close enough that they could be interacting with each other, with the more massive of the two physically drawing matter off the other. This is called an accreting binary, and we know of zillions of regular stars that do this, as well as ones orbiting white dwarfs, neutron stars, and black holes. None with a brown dwarf has ever been found.

Artwork depicting the two brown dwarfs, with matter transferring between them and the accretion hotspot on the receiving brown dwarf. Credit: Caltech/R. Hurt (IPAC)

Until now! They found one, called ZTF J1239+8347 (let’s call it J1239 for short). It’s about 1,100 light-years away, and exceedingly dim, which is why it’s evaded previous discovery [link to journal paper]. They found it in the Zwicky Transient Facility (an observatory that scans the skies looking for objects that change in brightness or move across the sky) survey data, and used Gaia observations to further constrain its physical nature. The brown dwarf binary system shows a clear change in brightness over a 57-minute period. Assuming that’s the orbital period, I ran the numbers and get a separation of less than 200,000 kilometers between them: roughly half the distance from Earth to the moon! They’re close.

That’s so close that the gravity of the slightly more massive brown dwarf can literally pull material off the other. In most situations like this that matter forms an accretion disk around the receiving object, but they’re so close together that instead the donor material slams directly into the receiving brown dwarf! That creates a hot spot in the atmosphere, and they find it’s at about 8,600°C or 15,500°F. Hot! Hotter than the sun’s surface, in fact.

They can’t measure the masses of the brown dwarfs directly, but the observations indicate they have between 60 – 80 Jupiter masses — right around the value needed to ignite fusion.

But the receiving BD is gaining mass…which implies that over time it may gain enough to become a true star. How cool is that?

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Jupiter is a behemoth. It’s the largest planet in the solar system by far — by volume, all the other planets could fit inside it — and very well studied by planetary scientists.

So you’d think we know its size — that is, its diameter — very accurately. However, the best measurements of its width have an uncertainty of about 4 kilometers. That’s actually pretty good considering Jupiter is about 140,000 km across! But models of its interior depend on the measured diameter, and getting it as nailed down as possible is a big deal.

The thing is, getting this number isn’t easy. For one, Jupiter is far away, and measurements made from Earth just have an inherent uncertainty to them. Also, Jupiter is a gas giant, which means what we see isn’t a solid surface, but the top of its atmosphere. That means there’s no easily observed benchmark (like sea level) to use for the measurements. Worse, in some places we see deeper in to its atmosphere, and in others clouds block that view. To get around that, scientists use a somewhat arbitrary benchmark as a baseline — the 1 bar level, where the pressure of the atmosphere is roughly equal to Earth’s pressure at sea level.

How do you measure that? One way is to observe stars as Jupiter passes in front of them from our point of view; as the starlight passes through the atmosphere it gets bent depending on the density of the gas, and this can be used to find the 1 bar level. Scientists did this decades ago when the Pioneer and Voyager probes passed by the planet, observing radio waves from stars (because visible light is easily blocked by gases in Jupiter’s air, so radio waves give a better view deeper down). 

The problem there is that the uncertainty was large, that 4 km number I mentioned earlier. Not bad, but we need better.

And we can do better. In a recent study, scientists used data from the wonderful Juno probe, which has been orbiting the huge world since 2016. They looked at radio wave observations of stars as the spacecraft saw them pass behind Jupiter (an event called an occultation) and, including effects from winds on the gas density, were able to measure the 1-bar diameter of Jupiter, knocking down the uncertainty by an order of magnitude (a factor of ten)! [link to journal paper]

They find Jupiter’s polar diameter is 133,684 km, and the equatorial diameter is 142,976 km, ±0.4 km.

Note that the planet is much thicker through the waist than through the poles^* . That’s mostly due to centrifugal force; Jupiter rotates in 9h 55m, which is the fastest of any planet, and, being the largest, that means the centrifugal force outwards at its equator is pretty big. On the equator you’d feel that counteracting the planet’s strong gravity pulling you down, which in turns means the planet is oblate, non-spherical. It’s flattened by over 6%, which is actually pretty obvious when you look at it through even a small telescope. In fact, the new measurements indicate Jupiter is 24 km smaller through the poles and 8 km smaller through the equator than previously thought, so it’s even more oblate than previously measured.

An image of Jupiter taken by the amazing Damian Peach, with a red circle drawn by me to show that the planet is wider through the equator than the poles. Credit: Damian Peach

To account for that, sometimes scientists use an “average” value for its diameter, which, using the new measurements, is 139,772 km. For comparison, Earth is about 12,742 km (note that’s an average too; Earth is also oblate but only by 0.5%, or roughly 22 km). By the way, 11 Earths could fit across Jupiter.

Jupiter is immense. 

And now we know just how immense, with far less uncertainty than before. This will improve our understanding of its interior, how the winds blow, and how gas giants in general behave. Not bad, just by using a better meterstick.

^*  I feel ya, big guy.

Homemade naan pizza with chicken sausage and onion, cooked to a crispy edge. This took literally ten minutes from start to finish. Credit: Phil Plait

My wife is a fantastic cook, and loves to experiment and make meals. I am the extremely fortunate recipient of this gift, and never fail to appreciate it.

She’s also pretty busy during the day, especially this time of year since she gardens, so she looks for ways to make dinner easier and quicker. Not too long ago she stumbled on a brilliant idea: naan pizza.

We always have naan around — though my computer programmer brain always loves to see it as NaN — because it’s fantastic. Naan is an Asian flatbread, generally somewhat oblong in shape, quite soft, and very yummy. Like many great breads it’s very simple and not hard to make, but it’s also widely available in grocery stores (not an ad, but we get ours at Costco and it’s delicious). I like to simply warm it up in the toaster oven and put a small amount of butter on it for a quick snack. 

But naan also makes for a fantastic pizza base. We just put on some tomato sauce (usually a marinara sauce that’s been simmered for a while to reduce the water content, which prevents the naan from getting soggy), cheese, and then whatever toppings we have around. Slap it in the oven on bake for a few minutes at, say, 350° F (175°C) until the cheese melts or the naan starts to brown (I like my crust crispy) and that’s it. You get your own personal-sized handheld pizza, simple and easy.

Also a lot healthier than frozen pizza, which is loaded with salt and other stuff my doctor recoils at when I tell her what I eat. When you make it yourself it’s really no harder than dealing with a frozen pizza, and you can control the salt and other things that are bad for you but make food glorious. I’ll note that it’s likely less expensive than frozen pie, too, depending on which one you get.

Speaking of which, as I write this it’s lunchtime. Hmmmm. I have an idea…

You can email me at thebadastronomer@gmail.com (though replies can take a while), and all my social media outlets are gathered together at about.me. Also, if you don’t already, please subscribe to this newsletter! And feel free to tell a friend or nine, too. Thanks!

I know a lot of stuff. Mostly that’s because I read a lot, and I like learning. When I was a kid — and even now, I’ll admit — a part of that is simply ingesting information, sometimes without as much context as it should have. In those cases, you might know something, but you don’t know why it’s something. But that bit of info you do know might be interesting enough that you want to learn more; it forms a seed that can grow into knowledge. Understanding.

A big part of that is not keeping those facts in isolation, but being able to make connections between them^* .

It’s not always easy; sometimes the connections are obvious, and sometimes they’re more subtle. And sometimes you have all the info you need but you’ve simply never put it all together.

I just experienced that, and it was pretty cool.

I was working on an article for Scientific American last week about meteor camera networks; automated cameras that photograph meteors as they appear in the sky. I was brainstorming topics I wanted to cover in the article, and one bit was about taking spectra of meteors — breaking up their light into individual colors so that their compositions can be found. I’ve written about this topic before, notably in an old SYFY article from 2020. A bright fireball occurred over Spain, and a network of cameras was able to obtain spectra. Surprisingly to me at the time, one of the brightest features in the spectra was from sodium (yup, half of the ingredients of table salt). It’s not terribly abundant in meteoroids (the solid bit of material that burns up to create the bright meteor), but sodium is very enthusiastic about emitting light, and does so at a lower temperature than other elements like silicon and calcium, so it shows up first as the meteor heats up.

A spectrum of a fireball over Spain reveals the presence of sodium in the meteoroid (the spectral line for sodium is arrowed). Credit: SMART network (click to see the very cool video)

So that’s one thing I knew. I also knew that they burn up about 80 – 100 kilometers above Earth’s surface. On top of that, I knew that there’s a thin layer of sodium that persists at that height, which would dissipate rather rapidly except that it’s replenished by the 50 – 100 tons of meteors that burn up in our atmosphere every day.

So look at all that information I knew, and could put together! I must be smart! S-M-R-T. Smart.

Earth as seen from the International Space Station, showing different bands of skyglow from various elements and molecules in the atmosphere. The yellow one closest to Earth’s surface is from meteoric sodium. Credit: Alex Rivest, from his amazing video

But there’s another thing I knew. Our atmosphere is unsteady, with little parcels of air blowing to and fro. These act like little lenses, bending incoming starlight and making it appear as if the stars are dancing — what normal people call twinkling, but astronomers for some goofy reason confusingly call seeing. Anyway, this blurs out images of astronomical objects, smearing them out in a way that makes it hard to see fine details. It also limits how faint an object you can see, because the light gets spread out, making something look dimmer. 

One way around that is adaptive optics. Astronomers find a bright star near their target and carefully (and extremely rapidly) measure how the seeing affects it. This movement can then be compensated using deformable mirrors, essentially counteracting the dancing light. Objects can be much sharper. We’re so good at this that ground-based telescopes now rival or even can exceed the sharp vision of Hubble and JWST.

But what if there’s no bright star near your object? How do you deal with seeing then?

The Very Large Telescope in Chile using lasers to create artificial stars. Credit: ESO 

One way is to make your own star! An artificial one, by using powerful lasers. If you pick the right color for your laser, when you shine it in the sky it excites elements high enough up that they emit light brightly, and are so high up they appear as tiny points. Boom! A bright artificial star you can track.

What element works well? Turns out sodium is perfect. It emits a lot of light when you zap it, and there’s a handy and persistent layer of it right there about 90 km up. Perfect for faking your own star.

So I knew all this as well. But what I didn’t realize until just now, what I never put together before, is that that sodium layer we use to fine tune our observations comes from meteors burning up in the atmosphere. 

We’re using astronomical objects — meteors — to better observe astronomical objects. Or, more succinctly: We’re using shooting stars to shoot stars.

How awesome is that?

Somehow I had all that info bumping around in my head, and never put it all together to make this realization. In hindsight it seems obvious, but I didn’t think of one thing at the same time as the other, so they never connected. It wasn’t until I wrote about meteor camera networks that all that stuff in my skull collided.

It was a very cool aha moment.

It was also a funny self-realization. I don’t know if this sudden eureka makes me smart because I figured it out, or not smart because it took me so long to figure it out. Maybe it’s both.

I know people who are very, very good at collating all the info in their heads. Randall Munroe always comes to mind; if you read his xkcd comic (and if you don’t, WHAT) you quickly realize he’s a genius: he knows a lot of stuff, and he is extremely adept at connecting it all. My wife is the same way; she’s an extraordinary gardener and knows vast amounts about plants, but she can also make the connections needed to understand not just what they are individually but also their ecosystem, how they interact. She’s that way with cooking, too, which my taste buds are quite thankful for.

Anyway, if there’s a lesson here, it’s to think about things, and when you do, try to think of other related things that might connect with it. You never know what will happen, except in the proximate case you might learn something, and in the more far-reaching case you can train yourself to ponder things differently, to get more adept at fitting the pieces together. I think that’s a pretty smart idea.

* Yes, obviously, this is vastly simplifying a vastly more complicated topic. I’m not trying to define intelligence here (I’m quite sure I can’t) so much as focus on one aspect of it. This is tricky territory, which is why I’m simplifying, but hopefully not oversimplifying.

You can email me at thebadastronomer@gmail.com (though replies can take a while), and all my social media outlets are gathered together at about.me. Also, if you don’t already, please subscribe to this newsletter! And feel free to tell a friend or nine, too. Thanks!

Space is unreasonably big.

Perhaps that’s the wrong adverb. We can use reason to try it understand it, but grasping it, getting a true intuitive understanding for it, is a whole ‘nuther story.

Space is too big to grasp. The numbers get so big so fast that analogies tend to break down; we can’t really get a feel for it. As an example, the fastest spacecraft leaving the solar system is currently Voyager 1, moving at nearly 17 kilometers per second relative to the sun. That’s already a ridiculously fast speed, over 60,000 kilometers per hour! That’s 600 times faster than a car on the highway. Who can truly absorb that kind of number?

Yet it’s practically motionless compared to the distances between stars. Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the sun, is about 4.25 light-years away, or 40 trillion kilometers; even at its breakneck speed it would take Voyager 1 seventy-six thousand years to get there.

Blarg. That’s too much for a human brain.

However, something a friend once mentioned to me many years ago makes this a bit easier.

The distance from the sun to Earth is about 150 million kilometers on average. That’s a useful unit to use in astronomy for various purposes, so much so that we gave it the rather glorious name of the Astronomical Unit, or AU. 1 AU = 150 million kilometers.

There are about 63,241 AUs in a light year. That’s a lot! Light only takes a little over 8 minutes to reach Earth from the sun, so in a year light travels a long way.

Here’s the fun bit: As it happens, there are 63,360 inches per mile (pardon the use of Imperial units, but that’s where the numbers work best). Those two numbers are very close; the difference between them is only about 0.2%!

That gives us an interesting scale to use. Picture Earth and the sun being one inch apart. On that scale, a light-year is a mile long! That to me is a graspable scale, and a terrifying one; a light-year is an immense distance. It takes months if not years for spacecraft to travel a single AU — just one inch on our imaginary map — so traveling a single light-year is well beyond an epic journey.

And that won’t even get you to the nearest star. If an AU is an inch, Proxima Centauri is 4.25 miles away. Is there a town or a store or a friend’s house 4.25 miles from you? Next time you drive there, think about how every inch you travel is like going from Earth to the sun (at highway speeds, it takes about a millisecond to travel one inch). Compare that to how long it takes you to get to your destination.

Yeah. Space is big.

See that star circled there? That’s the closest star to the sun. If you started walking now, you’ll get there in a little over a billion years. Credit: Digitized Sky Survey 2; Acknowledgement: Davide De Martin/Mahdi Zamani

And that’s just the nearest star. Even this scale breaks down in our minds rapidly. In the one-inch-is-one-AU scale, the bright star Betelgeuse is about 500 miles away. The Orion Nebula is about 1,300 miles away (for scale, in real terms Denver is about 1,500 miles from Washington, DC).

Our Milky Way Galaxy is way way bigger than you realize. At 120,000 light-years wide in real life, on our new scale it would still stretch halfway to the moon.

In other words, even shrinking our map hugely down in size, we still need astronomical analogies to describe how big our galaxy is.

As for humanity’s achievements, Voyager 1 launched in 1977, almost 50 years ago. On our inchly scale, in those five long decades it’s traveled 14 feet. Fourteen feet.

Sometimes, when I’m interviewed for a news program or podcast, they ask me what’s the one thing I wish people understood better about astronomy. There are a lot of good answers, but I almost always say “scale”. The depth of space swallows up our brains and envelops them in a dark, stifling vastness, so huge that it can actually be terrifying. This is why space exploration is so hard, this is why we still struggle to map even the nearest planets, this is why so much of the solar system is (literally) terra incognita.

Yet this knowledge is also uplifting: it’s amazing we can know anything at all about objects across these crushing distances. And we do; in fact we know a lot, and our knowledge grows every day.

Space may be formidably, inconceivably deep, but our brains are capable of traveling those distances vicariously in our imagination, and even more reasonably through our understanding of science. That to me puts everything in perspective rather nicely.

• You probably know I’m a big proponent of citizen science projects, so here’s a new one: looking for gravitational lensing in Euclid data! This is part of the Zooniverse project, so go there to sign up and help astronomers find warps in space!
  

• I’ve written before about how vegetation on Earth absorbs most visible light but is highly reflective in infrared (which is why trees and such glow an eerie silvery-white in infrared footage). Now, a team of scientists has looked into using this fact to see if they can detect vegetation on other planets! The answer is: possibly, which to be honest is better than I would’ve thought [link to journal paper].
  

• Scientists analyzing various meteorites to determine their composition have found measurable contaminants in them, including ink, adhesives, and lubricants [link to journal paper]. These clearly came from the handling and processing of the rocks, and are not native to them, raising an alarm that the way these precious resources are protected from contamination needs to be critically assessed and improved.

You can email me at thebadastronomer@gmail.com (though replies can take a while), and all my social media outlets are gathered together at about.me. Also, if you don’t already, please subscribe to this newsletter! And feel free to tell a friend or nine, too. Thanks!

Mark Boslough is a scientist who studies the physics of asteroid and comet impacts on Earth. He wrote, for example, the first 3D code to simulate the behavior of a Tunguska-like impact, and has written many papers on similar events.

He also is a tireless debunker of bad impact science; the latest has been from a group of pseudoscientists who promote the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis. They claim (with very bad evidence and huge conclusion-jumping to) airbursts — explosions from incoming space rocks that occur well above the ground — wiped out the Clovis people about 13,000 years ago, explains biblical accounts of cities wiped out in the Middle East, and triggered a glaciation period that lasted about a millennium (actually, evidence is piling up that a series of massive volcanic eruptions may instead be the culprit). Mark has been the loudest voice debunking this bad archaeology/geology/planetary science.

He and I chat back and forth about this stuff fairly often, and he let me know he’s the lead author on a new paper published in the journal Meteoritics & Planetary Science about the problem of pseudoscience and the spread of misinformation [link to journal paper]. He and his coauthors (including many other impact scientists) cover the topic as it relates to their field, but extrapolate it to others as well. It’s a pretty interesting paper, with examples from their own experience dealing with relatively benign Tunguska misinfo up to the shenanigans of the “Comet Research Group”, a collection of pseudoscientists who publish really bad papers in ways that avoid the usual mainstream peer review process — for example, they publish in their own bespoke journal.

They tend to have splashy results, like when they claimed a comet airburst (when the nucleus explodes high above the ground due to ramming the atmosphere at hypersonic speeds) destroyed the area around the Tall el-Hammam site in Jordan. This has been roundly debunked (they claim it’s connected to Sodom, which telegraphs their own personal bias in this, in my opinion), but when they made the announcement in 2021 it got a lot of coverage. I remember this; I read the paper and was very interested, of course, but as I was taking notes I got the feeling things weren’t adding up. Within days I heard from Mark about it, and yup: it’s nonsense. They also play very fast and loose with evidence; there is photo alteration going on in their images, for example, which is part of the reason the Scientific Reports journal wound up retracting the paper.

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Anyway, Mark’s paper is interesting in that it divides the misinformation into three broad categories in a way I hadn’t seen before^* . The first is short-term misinfo, like things that affect a single news cycle. This spreads rapidly since it’s usually some sexy result like the Tall el-Hammam “study”. Their remedy to help staunch this flow of nonsense is for scientists who tend to be asked by the media for interviews to keep a handy network of scientists in other fields and specialties, and refer to them for things they cannot immediately answer. That way, better info gets out there, with specific debunkings to prevent further spread. 

Medium-term misinfo follows the publication cycle, so months to a year or so. This can be mitigated, they advise, by scientists submitting comments to journals where a sketchy paper has been published, or review platforms like PubPeer. They point out a lot of retractions have resulted from such actions, which is great.

The final category is long-term misinfo, which reaches over many years. Think folklore, or “common knowledge”. They give an interesting example: the claim that 80 million trees were felled in Siberia by the Tunguska impact, a claim I have seen many times, and may be guilty of repeating myself (I didn’t find anything I had written specifically but a lot of websites and such have done so over the years). They show this is an exaggeration based on an early “educated guess” on how many trees would be knocked down so that an estimate of the Tunguska energy release could be determined. It’s been repeated as actual fact over the decades. Their remediation for this is perhaps the hardest of the three: don’t take such things as granted, but investigate them and try to find their provenance.