Mastodawn

Pablonius Monk 🇺🇦3h ago

Most Texans haven't been to this part of the state - the TransPecos. Neither have I. Bucket list, for sure.

The Texas Star Party Is the Darkest Place to Be 🔭

These Star Partygoers Come to West Texas in Search of True Darkness

For nearly fifty years, the Texas Star Party has built a community around a shared sense of wonder.

@TexasMonthly

https://www.texasmonthly.com/travel/texas-star-party-big-bend/?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub

#Texas #TexasStarParty #FortDavis #McDonaldObservatory #MilkyWay #Astronomy

OptimusPrimeBot 14h ago

Milky Way Habitable Zone ✨

#Astronomy #Astrophysics #Exoplanet #Galaxy #MilkyWay

⏩ 2 new pictures from NASA (SVS) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:ListFiles?limit=4&user=OptimusPrimeBot&ilshowall=1&offset=20260529125602

TKSST • seethis.tv 🌈🪐✨1d ago

🛸🔭 Using #math and #engineering, an #aerospace scientist explains why #interstellar visitors face extreme obstacles like vast distances, staggering fuel requirements, micrometeorite impacts, and conflicting design trade-offs – making an #alien visit to #Earth far less likely than #UFO headlines suggest.

👉 https://www.popsci.com/science/could-aliens-ever-visit-earth-an-aerospace-scientist-unpacks-the-challenges-of-interstellar-spaceflight/

#aliens #ufo #space #astronomy #physics #rockets #nuclear #fusion #antimatter #science #milkyway #pentagon

Could aliens ever visit Earth? An aerospace scientist unpacks the challenges of interstellar spaceflight.

The universe is vast and teeming with stars – but if intelligent life exists, it may not be able to visit Earth.

Popular Science

Mike Riversdale 2d ago

"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.", Carl Sagan

#MilkyWay #astrophotography #stars #galaxy

Tom On A Budget 3d ago

This was one of my favourite camp sites on near the Atlantic coast in the South of Brazil.

#adv #smallbike #125cc #motocamping #adventure #camping #milkyway #starphotography #travel #rtw

Daniel Fischer 3d ago

A Lunar-Mass #PrimordialBlackHole #Microlensing Candidate in the #MilkyWay Halo: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19375 -> StarXiv episode: https://starxiv.com/2026/05/25/episode-37-lunar-craters-primordial-black-holes-growing-galaxies/

AMPM II. A Lunar-Mass Primordial Black Hole Microlensing Candidate in the Milky Way Halo

Primordial Black Holes (PBH) are hypothesised to form during inflation and have long been considered a candidate for compact dark matter. Gravitational microlensing is known as a productive method for exoplanet discovery and characterisation, but also provides an experimental avenue to constrain the PBH abundance in the mass regime from $\sim 10^{-11}\ M_{\odot}$ to $\sim 10^5\ M_{\odot}$. We performed a high-cadence, optical microlensing survey with DECam over five nights towards the Large Magellanic Cloud, sensitive to microlensing timescales from minutes to days. Here, we report the discovery of an hour-long microlensing event. An optical depth probabilistic analysis indicates that the lensing object, which we refer to as Phoebe, is 5 orders of magnitude more likely to be part of the Milky Way's dark matter halo than part of the stellar content of the Milky Way and Large Magellanic Cloud. No matter the location of Phoebe, it is among the fastest and lowest mass microlensing signals ever detected, with an Einstein timescale of approximately 60 minutes. Using Bayesian modelling, we interpret Phoebe as a PBH with mass $0.032^{+0.227}_{-0.027} M_{\oplus}$, or approximately 3 lunar masses. Phoebe suggests a population of compact, lunar-mass objects associated with the dark matter distribution of the Milky Way, and potentially opens a new window to the physics of inflation.

arXiv.org