Blue the Science Dude
@science-dude
Science communicator, Irish banjo player, and defender of reason and equality.
The aurora australis imaged May 30 from 441 kilometers above the southern Indian Ocean. It is created by charged particles from the Sun colliding with Earth's magnetic field. My mother thought the northern lights were caused by ice crystals in the atmosphere. The truth is SO MUCH COOLER! 🧪🔭
50 years ago today. Viking 1 landed on Mars to search for signs of life.🦠 Its Labeled Release (LR) experiment famously yielded positive results for metabolism on Mars. Other on-board experiments and later analyses refute that finding. I am among those who think LR detected life, then killed it.🧪🔭
It’s on! Imagine ‘Comic Con’ in a transporter accident with a science & engineering conference @first-light-con.bsky.social! Official program moving forward. Make science frickin’ cool again. Follow to stay in the loop for 2027. 🔭🧪 www.firstlightcon.org
High atop Cerro Tololo in Chile, the Blanco Telescope has an AMAZING view of the cosmos, thanks to the Dark Energy Camera, which was part of the discovery of dark energy. It recently imaged the Southern Crown, a blazing star factory about 430 light-years away. 🧪🔭 @noirlabastro.bsky.social
A new approach in search for 'technosignatures'. Compare the metal make up of planetary debris around white dwarf stars (future fate of the Earth and Sun) with what would naturally be expected. Evidence of doomed aliens was lacking, but some intriguing targets. 🧪🔭👽 doi.org/10.3847/1538...
Today is the birthday of Professor Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who made the Nobel-Prize-winning discovery of radio pulsars in 1967! Jokingly first called LGM (little green men).🔭🧪 She didn’t receive the award. Her supervisor, who discouraged her research, did.
A star’s explosive death triggered the birth of stellar twins. 🔭🧪 In the aftermath of a supernova @almaobservatory.bsky.social discover two ‘hot cores,’ the cradles of infant stars. The massive star exploded about 1,600 years ago. doi.org/10.3847/1538...
Allergies can be unpleasant, even deadly. One weirdly nasty allergy to red meat, dubbed alpha-gal syndrome, is spreading across the US thanks lone star tick bites. Just when you need the CDC. SciAm reports details of a recent conference on the illness. 🧪 www.scientificamerican.com/article/dead...
On July 10, 1962, the US launched Telstar 1, world’s 1st active communications satellite engineered by John Pierce. It was directly inspired by Arthur C. Clarke’s story “Islands in the Sky.” Harold Rosen later engineered Syncom 1, 1st geostationary satellite. Had pleasure of working with all 3. 🧪🔭
Earth’s climate is in a perpetual state of tenuous balance. Atmospheric chemistry, polar and alpine ice, forests, albedo, ocean circulation, etc. Fiddle with one nob and everything else responds. Actions have consequences. So does inaction. 🧪
Buckle up. “El Nino - Nature's thermostat releasing ocean heat to supercharge weather extremes and global temperatures -- powers up further. An 81% chance to be top of the chart level, likely historic strength.” -Seth Borenstein, AP apnews.com/article/el-n... 🧪
There's a reason modern bands are still compared to the Beatles. They changed how we appreciate music. Similarly, Hubble changed how we appreciate the cosmos. Consider M88. 63 million light-years away w/ an active black hole 100 million times the mass of the Sun. 🧪🔭 science.nasa.gov/missions/hub...
Blue's Science Communication Rule #1 "Precision is the enemy of understanding." You can be balls-on accurate without being pedantically precise. 🧪 In the words of former Hubble spokesperson Ray Villard, "It doesn't matter how precise you are if no one bothers to read your story." #sciencecomms
Merging black holes and I have something in common; we both settle into the most "disordered" possible state. Oscar Madison Conjecture: the final state of merging black holes follows one simple rule. *Nature tends toward the state with the highest entropy.* 🧪🔭 #blackholes doi.org/10.1103/hvp6...
As I prepare for @dragoncon.org science fair, I was reminded of a story I wrote about the discovery of leftover building blocks of galaxy formation - hydrogen gas clouds - swarming around Andromeda, which are only visible in radio light (orange). 🧪🔭 #dragoncon www.nrao.edu/pr/2004/m31H...
This is one of those astronomy results that bakes my noodle. Announced in 2023, the Gemini Observatory traced a gamma-ray burst to nucleus of ancient galaxy, suggesting stars can undergo demolition-derby-like collisions! Cosmic car crash on a stellar scale!🔭🧪 noirlab.edu/public/news/...
Mosquitos, blood-sucking buggers, can fly in the rain! 🧪🦟 How?! Each weighs 50 times less than a raindrop yet aren’t battered by falling drops. It’s all fluid dynamics! Mosquitos’ low mass and slow speed means raindrops are unaffected by the collisions. share.google/PJ0UIrvJfaRb...
Cosmic fireworks! 🎆🎇 Two protostars (mere 100,000 years old) in Orion got perilously close, flinging their material into space! @almaobservatory.bsky.social captured aftermath! 🧪🔭 I loved writing this! share.google/u1kS6UO8RAl6...
Mind the gap! Or the gaps in the protostar outflows. New @stsci.edu image is a cracker to be sure but the IR data from JWST also tells a story about star formation: protostars gather matter in episodes, seen as gaps (left). But I still think Hubble is cooler. 🧪🔭 science.nasa.gov/missions/web...
The Rubin Observatory is a game changer! Unique. Powerful. It will create a "movie" of the universe as it evolves! It's true mission begins today, a 10-year survey of space and time. I visited the site during construction and once got a "butt dial" from Vera Rubin herself. 🧪🔭 brnw.ch/21x3LB1
Dark matter is the hide-and-seek champion of the cosmos! We know it's out there, but we've never been able to say "Tag! You're it!"🧪🔭 New idea: Halos of self-annihilating dark matter could be faintly glowing around gas-giant planets like Jupiter. Olly olly oxen free! doi.org/10.1103/g53c...
Ghostly neutrinos. Billions pass through you each second. A light-year of lead has only a 50% chance of stopping one. ALMA found that a burst of mega-energetic neutrinos came from a star-forming galaxy rather than supermassive black hole. VERY unexpected!🧪🔭 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Two merging black holes (1.3 billion light-years away) scrunched & yanked the fabric of space itself before merging in a burst of gravitational waves detected by LIGO, Jan. 2025.🌀 The telltale fingerprint of 'frame dragging' was found hiding in the signal.🔭🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Past Podcast: Violence in Videogames... the research is dubious at best. Here's one of my favorite podcasts on the topic.🧪 If you are worried about violent video games triggering aggressive behavior in children, new research may help to alleviate your concerns. www.podbean.com/ep/pb-caxa5-...
June 24, 2017. 16,500' elevation on the Chajnantor plateau in Chile, taking in the ALMA telescope! Amazing engineering, transformative science. High and dry to enable submillimeter wavelenght radio astronomy. (Fact: ALMA was most sensitive part of Event Horizon Telescope's image of SgrA*)🧪🔭
The solar wind helps protect Earth from ultra-nasty cosmic rays. The precise desitance to the solar wind's termination shock (where it drops from hypersonic to subsonic) is hard to pin down. New model helps forecast when NASA's New Horizons will cross that threshold.🧪🔭 doi.org/10.1016/j.as...
Saying NASA's Perseverance rover is “car size” doesn’t do it justice! The scale model at NASA HQ is shockingly huge up close! Launched in 2020, it’s still searching for signs of past life on the Red Planet! 🧪🔭 Model shown here w/ café & donuts in the background.
Prions are odd infectious agents. Not a bacteria or virus. Rather a normal protein folded in funky, fatal fashion. But wait, docs+AI are testing prion bits (peptides) to see if they can fight germs rather than turn brain tissue into Swiss cheese. 🧀 www.newswise.com/articles/ai-... 🧪⚕️
Europa, the icy moon that could... be hospitable to life. 🧪🔭 Europa Clipper will arrive in 2030. Before then, astronomers are using radar to delve below its frozen exterior. The technique, bistatic radar, helps study objects in the solar system. 100m GBT Rocks! public.nrao.edu/news/gbt-eur...