This is a picture I made of the 51 Pegasi system, which was the first star similar to the Sun found to host an exoplanet (a planet outside the solar system). It's a real star system, and the planet actually exists.
51 Pegasi b (which has been officially named Dimidium) is about half the size of Jupiter, making it a gas giant. But it orbits its star, Helvetios, every 4 days.
Dimidium's year is 4 days long
For comparison, Mercury's year is 86 days long.
Because of this, Dimidium is extremely close to Helvetios, making diagrams like this possible. This is to scale, and is what the 51 Pegasi system would actually look like if you were to visit it.

(Keep in mind that the picture of the star and planet are not real, there is no telescope in the world powerful enough to get that much detail. It's just my interpretation of what Helvetios and Dimidium might look like)

DISCLAIMER: I am a space fact guy not a politics guy. This is a space fact that relates to the Israel-Palestine conflict, which I am absolutely NOT getting involved in the politics of, this is just a fact I find interesting

The first ever combat to take place in space just happened today
Israel has reportedly (altitude not confirmed yet) shot down a Yemeni missile that was above the Karman Line, the internationally recognized boundary of space. This marks the first time in all of human history a war has been fought in space.

We are truly in the space age now

damn havent posted in a while
anyway


DINKINESH HAS A MOON!!!!!



just a few days ago, NASA's Lucy spacecraft flew by the first of it's 12 asteroid targets, a small, (less than a mile wide) asteroid named Dinkinesh.
But instead of just one asteroid, there were two. This was totally unexpected, but turns out Dinkinesh has another, smaller asteroid orbiting around it like a moon. This is an asteroid binary, and it's estimated that about 15% of the asteroids in our solar system are binaries like this.

Dinkinesh is just the first of Lucy's targets, and it'll arrive at its next one, an asteroid named Donaldjohanssen, in 2025.

As you can see in the picture, Dinkinesh is a rubble pile asteroid, which is an asteroid that's more like a loose pile of pebbles than a coherent rock, which is seen in the many boulders on its surface. Spacecraft have actually visited several of these "rubble piles" before, which are seen in this image. These asteroids are Bennu, Ryugu, Itokawa, Dimorphos, and Didymos.

QUARTZ CLOUDS ON DITSO???
Ditsö̀ what a great exoplanet
thags it’s official name too so it’s not just WASP-17b
but yeah we might have found clouds made of quartz on it because it’s a hot jupiter that orbits way too close to its star and so is way too hot for its own good

a collision of planets in another solar system might’ve been detected

so there’s a star called ASSASN-21qj which suddenly brightened and then dimmed over a period of a few years, and we have no idea why. But recently there was a new theory that explains everything, and that’s two planets both about 25x the mass of earth hitting each other and being destroyed
The brightening was caused by the explosion as the planets hit each other, and the dimming was caused by debris from the impact covering the whole system. If this is true, this is the first time we’ve ever spotted a collision of planets actually happen.

Fun fact: sharks are older than the north star
I mean that literally

Polaris, aka the north star, is about 70 million years old. Sharks evolved 400 million years ago. Sharks are older than some stars in our sky.
They’re also about the same age as Vega, the fifth-brightest star in the night sky

colonizing the moon would literally be the best thing ever
been thinking about it recently and now i’m excited again
i made a video about colonizing the moon to explain why: How a Moon Colony Would Change Everything
youtu.be/EQRuYgj7q00

Just made a new video about a special type of planet called a Trojan Planet
They’re pretty interesting
www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYCr7JKCkdY

go to any wikipedia article
any one you want
and click the first link in the article, and keep repeating that for all the articles you get to
you will end up at philosophy

Just finished my biggest Colonization of the Solar System episode yet: The Colonization of Jupiter!
www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVcO-6jTAU4

methane has been being found on a bunch of exoplanets recently and that’s good

So there’s a bit of a problem in astronomy called the “missing methane” problem. Methane is a very common chemical in our solar system, but for some reason we weren’t finding it in other solar systems, which was weird.
But recently with the James Webb Space Telescope we’ve found some methane in the atmospheres of two planets:
-Wadirum, (originally named WASP-80b before being given an official name in 2019) a planet half the size of jupiter and very, very hot
-and K2-18b, a planet 8x bigger than earth that we recently confirmed was a hycean planet (a hydrogen atmosphere and a gigantic global ocean)

So looks like the solution to the missing methane was we just weren’t looking hard enough

Mulchatna is a cool planet

It's 3.5x the size of Jupiter (and actually exists in real life), so its bigger than every planet in the solar system combined and then some, and orbits closer to its star than Mercury orbits the sun. It also has a weirdly-shaped orbit. It's an oval, instead of a circle. This means that it's perihelion, or closest point to its star, and aphelion, or furthest point, are very different distances, which causes Mulchatna to have some super extreme seasons.

Like the temperature variations are measured in the thousands of degrees. It's a crazy type of planet called an "eccentric Jupiter" and we actually know of quite a few of them.

Here's a video where I explain it more: www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GwbkS-J4zk