Writer, editor, magazine maker, podcaster, procrastinator.
Former editor of Discover and American Scientist magazines. Co-host of #ScienceRules podcast. Invisible Universe on Substack: https://invisibleuniverse.substack.com/
Co-founder of OpenMind magazine.
#science #nature #space #scicomm
| Bluesky | https://bsky.app/profile/coreyspowell.bsky.social |
| OpenMind | https://www.openmindmag.org |
| Substack | https://substack.com/@coreyspowell |
By definition, it's really hard to see a galaxy that's mostly made of dark matter. Finding this one required doing a statistical search for globular clusters that were gathered around apparent nothingness.
Full paper at link.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/adddab/meta #space #science #astronomy
How much blacker could this galaxy be? The answer is none, none more black.
"Candidate Dark Galaxy-2" appears to be 99.99% dark matter, detectable only by the way its gravity holds together a surrounding set of star clusters.
https://www.science.org/content/article/hubble-spotted-dark-galaxy-s-least-99-9-dark-matter #space #science #nature
If humans had ultraviolet vision, "I believe you’d see this swath of glow on the top of every tree under the thunderstorm. It’d probably look like a pretty cool light show, as if thousands of UV-flashing fireflies descended on the treetops."
-- Patrick McFarland
Some people seek out rare birds or chase storms. Patrick McFarland modified a Toyota minivan so he could track down the subtle electric "corona" that shines around trees, potentially shaping the ecology of forests.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2025GL119591 #science #nature #ecology
During thunderstorms, electric discharges in the air cause trees to glow with an ultraviolet aura. You can't see it with your eyes, but researchers have finally managed to measure it & recreate it in the lab.
https://news.agu.org/press-release/thunderstorms-conjure-ghostly-coronae-in-treetops-observed-outdoors-for-the-first-time/ #science #nature
In the same spirit, here's a periodic table scaled to show the relative abundances of elements in Saturn.
It's enriched in heavy elements compared to the cosmic average...but hydrogen still dominates overwhelmingly.
If you scale each entry on the periodic table to show the relative abundance of elements, this is what the composition of the universe looks like: hydrogen, helium, and a pinch of everything else.
(This simple graphic was created in the early days of the web. I miss that madly creative era.) #space #science #art
No matter how bad the weather is here, it's nothing compared to conditions on Uranus. There, winter means 40 years of darkness & auroras that follow the planet's tilted, twisted magnetic field.
JWST just provided the best look yet at those Uranian aurora displays.
https://esawebb.org/news/weic2602/ #space #science #nature #weather
First a hydrogen leak. Now a separate *helium* leak is causing a delay in NASA's Artemis 2 mission around the Moon.
The giant rocket is rolling off the launch pad, with the flight delayed to April 1 at the earliest.
https://spaceflightnow.com/2026/02/21/nasas-artemis-2-rocket-hit-by-new-problem-expected-to-bump-moonshot-into-early-april/ #space #science #tech
