By New York Zoological Society — Image derived from: Chimpanzee seated at a typewriter; Public Domain. I have bad news for one of statistics favorite sayings. As the story goes, given enough time and enough monkey’s randomly pressing keys on a keyboard, the complete works of shakespeare will eventually get typed out purely by chance. This is called the Infinite Monkey Theorem. The only problem is, according to work by Stephen Woodcock and Jay Falletta, our universe won’t last long enough for this to happen… given just one monkey. And when the increased the count to equal the...
The butterfly that was actually a planet forming disk
Object IRAS 23077+6707 The sky is littered with small fuzzy blobs that are chock full of science waiting to be understood. And one such fuzzy blob looks surreally like a butterfly. Discovered in 2016, this object, cataloged as IRAS 23077+6707, is located about...
Galaxies caught in the act of merging their blackholes
As we head toward summer, JWST is getting ready to start its second year of science operations. During its brief period of operations, this $8.8 billion spacecraft has been working hard to prove it can do science worthy of its price tag. Adding to it’s list of...
Geology points to the path most chosen
One of the most common questions faced by those of us who study other worlds is this, “What good is studying planets when we have issues here on Earth?” Well, it turns out Earth happens to be a planet and sometimes geology can tell us really cool things about...
Closer Look: The 2024 Carrington Event
On Wednesday, May 8, community member ThirdRock Astronomy brought to my attention a massive sunspot that was growing to resemble the Sunspot that produced the 1859 Carrington Event, which lit the skies with aurora and powered the telegraph grid with induced current. ...
Mars was a badly made Earth 2
How a wet Mars may have appeared based on MOLA data. Credit: Ittiz When we look out across the Universe, or even just our Solar System, we are only seeing a moment in the fast history of space. We see a galaxy fully formed with spiral arms and a nice little bar. We...
Some planets had rough childhoods before getting kicked out
Jupiter-Mass Binary Objects. Credit NASA/ESA/CSA/McCaughrean & Person One of the new weird things planetary science has to explain is the preponderance of free floating planets that JWST has discovered. In October 2023, Samuel Pearson & Mark McCaughrean posted...
JWST measures alien weather
Temperature map of WASP-43b provided by NASA's JWST One of JWST’s raison detres is studying the atmospheres of exoplanets - alien worlds orbiting far off stars. In a new paper in Nature Astronomy, we get spectacular evidence that JWST will achieve its goals. The...
Closer Look: Io and Juno Begin to Part Ways
Jupiter’s four largest satellites, the Galilean moons, are named after consorts of the Roman god Jupiter: Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. Credit: NASA/JPL/DLR In Roman mythology, Jupiter is not exactly a faithful god. Some would allege him willing to bed just...
Stellar Winds Spotted on Three Sun-like Stars
Infrared image of the shockwave (red arc) created by the massive giant star Zeta Ophiuchi in an interstellar dust cloud. The tenuous winds of sun-like main-sequence stars are much more difficult to observe. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech; NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team...
Massive Object Detected Via Gravitational Puppetry
A screenshot from a visualization of the orbit of the Gaia BH3 system as a whole through the Milky Way. Credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC- CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO. Acknowledgments: Stefan Jordan with Gaia Sky. The universe we see doesn’t always reflect the universe that is out there....