Keoek
- 8 Followers
- 60 Following
- 128 Posts
Michael Busch
Prof. Sam LawlerFirst interview done. Didn't get to talk about the 22% collision chance with Earth, but did talk about how you can see satellites and space junk with your eyes.
Active satellites look like stars that are moving across the sky, space junk will be flashing because it's tumbling. (Not coloured like from an airplane, just white flashes).
Anyway... maybe a few more people will be inspired to go out and look up and see how many damn satellites there are.
Next interview in 4 hours. I'm tired.
Mary McIntyre AstronomyI haven't had time to do my annual #clairobscur times for 2025 but a last minute heads-up that the #LunarX & #LunarV are visible from 6pm tonight! (Mon 6th Jan) The image below shows you where they'll be. You'll need binoculars or a telescope to see them. Good luck!
GlastomichelleIt's time to put the draft together for my Glastonbury Tor 2026 calendar. We've had a couple of votes already so it is starting to take shape. Here is the next shortlist for April so you can choose your favourite. No.1 Tiny Dancer, No.2 April storm, No.3 Spring has sprung, No. 4 Mystical morning.
Kelly LepoOn January 16, NASA will send astronauts to repair the NICER (Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer) X-ray telescope attached to the International Space Station.
In May 2023, NICER developed a light leak due to damage in the telescope’s thermal shields. Sunlight enters through these damaged sections, saturating sensors and making daytime observations more difficult.
Here are some images of astronaut Nick Hague practicing in a pool.
This will be the first NASA servicing mission for a space telescope since the last Hubble mission in 2009.
Astronaut Set to Patch NASA’s X-ray Telescope Aboard Space Station - NASA Science
NASA astronaut Nick Hague will install patches to the agency’s NICER (Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer) X-ray telescope on the International Space Station as part of a spacewalk scheduled for Jan. 16. Hague, along with astronaut Suni Williams, will also complete other tasks during the outing. NICER will be the first NASA observatory repaired on-orbit since […]
erlHope you're all having a lovely sunday evening! Here's a short science thread! #astronomy #astrodon #science
This paper is part of one of my longer-term projects, combining observations I (and collaborators) collected from 2018 to 2021 with extensive modeling to find the largest local supermassive black known to date, 22 billion times the mass of the sun.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.01493
1/5
A 22-Billion Solar Mass Black Hole in Holmberg 15A with Keck KCWI Spectroscopy and Triaxial Orbit Modeling
Holmberg 15A (H15A), the brightest cluster galaxy of Abell 85, has an exceptionally low central surface brightness even among local massive elliptical galaxies with distinct stellar cores, making it exceedingly challenging to obtain high-quality spectroscopy to detect a supermassive black hole (SMBH) at its center. Aided by the superb sensitivity and efficiency of KCWI at the Keck II Telescope, we have obtained spatially resolved stellar kinematics over a ${\sim}100''\times 100''$ contiguous field of H15A for this purpose. The velocity field exhibits a low amplitude (${\sim}20\mathrm{~km~s}^{-1}$) rotation along a kinematic axis that is prominently misaligned from the photometric major axis, a strong indicator that H15A is triaxially shaped with unequal lengths for the three principal axes. Using 2500 observed kinematic constraints, we perform extensive calculations of stellar orbits with the triaxial Schwarzschild code, TriOS, and search over ${\sim}$40,000 galaxy models to simultaneously determine the mass and intrinsic 3D shape parameters of H15A. We determine a ratio of $p=0.89$ for the middle-to-long principal axes and $q=0.65$ for the short-to-long principal axes. Our best estimate of the SMBH mass, $M_\mathrm{BH}=(2.16^{+0.23}_{-0.18})\times 10^{10}M_{\odot}$, makes H15A -- along with NGC 4889 -- the galaxies hosting the most massive SMBHs known in the local universe. Both SMBHs lie significantly above the mean $M_\mathrm{BH}-σ$ scaling relation. Repeating the orbit modeling with the axisymmetrized version of TriOS produces worse fits to the KCWI kinematics and increases $M_\mathrm{BH}$ to $(2.55\pm 0.20) \times 10^{10}M_{\odot}$, which is still significantly below $M_\mathrm{BH}=(4.0\pm 0.8) \times 10^{10}M_{\odot}$ reported in a prior axisymmetric study of H15A.
There was a strange orange shiny thing in the sky today. Not entirely sure what it was😂 but it cast a beautiful golden light over the ground below. Taken on Glastonbury Tor.
Patrizia Rinaldi"Rome was not destroyed by outsiders. It was the work of barbarians from within." https://www.ft.com/content/379dadff-92f7-4901-9432-403fd3c56f5d
