Nereide

@drnereide

Physicist interested in Astrophysics and Particle Physics| Research in Math and Science Edu| Math and Science Writer| Teacher and Teacher Trainer My blog: More about me:

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Nereide@drnereide· 19d

1/12 Think of two massive stars born together, then gone supernovae tens of thousands of years apart. From Earth, their remnants appear close and partially overlapping in the sky. 🔭🧪⚛️ It might not be a simple coincidence. Here’s what astronomers have discovered. #galactic #Universe

Image of two supernova remnants. Right: bright Jellyfish Nebula (IC 443). Left: fainter G189.6+3.3. Violet filament between them marks shared interaction with a molecular cloud. Various colors show X-rays, gamma rays and other wavelengths.

Credit: NASA Goddard / M. Michailidis et al. 2026 (Fermi, eROSITA, WISE, Swift and others).

Nereide@drnereide· 21d

1/7 On July 21, 1976, NASA released the first color image from the surface of Mars.🔭🧪⚛️ It had been taken that same day by the Viking 1 lander — the day after the successful landing on the planet. But it was not exactly the version we see today. #HistSci #Mars #SpaceHistory #space #planetsci

This is the historic first color image of Mars, captured by the Viking 1 spacecraft on 21 July 1976,.
The view from Viking 1 is from the southeast. Red-orange surface materials cover most of the Martian surface, apparently forming a thin layer over the darker rock exposed in patches, as in the lower right.
The sky has a reddish hue, likely due to the scattering and reflection of reddish sediments suspended in the lower atmosphere.

Nereide@drnereide· 23d

1/6 “The only difference between men and women in science is that the women have the babies. This makes it more difficult for women in science, but… it is merely another challenge to be overcome.” — Rosalyn Yalow, biophysicist born 19 July 1921. 🧪 ⚛️ #HistSci #WomenInSTEM #science

Portrait of Rosalyn Yalow in her laboratory wearing a lab coat, October 1977. Scientific equipment is visible in the background.

Credit: US Information Agency (United States Federal Government) – Public Domain.
Via Wikimedia Commons (from "Women of Influence", pg. 28).

Nereide@drnereide· 23d

1/11 Imagine having a detailed map of the youngest & hottest stars in the #MilkyWay — the ones that form & die within just a few million years. A research team (Quintana et al.) has recently completed exactly that using Gaia DR3 data, reaching out to 2 kpc (~ 6,520 ly) from the Sun.🔭⚛️🧪 #galactic

Here’s how OB-type stars are spread across our local Milky Way, out to 2 kpc from the Sun.
The red and pink patches reveal the denser concentrations of these young stars. Among the standout features are the Sagittarius-Carina arm, Cepheus Spur, the big empty Perseus Gap, and associations such as Cyg OB2 and Ori OB1.

Credit: Figure 5 (right panel) – Quintana et al. 2026

Nereide@drnereide· 24d

1/7 «...the parallelism holds not only for the major paradigm changes,[...], but also for the far smaller ones [...] . Scientific revolutions need seem revolutionary only to those whose paradigms are affected by them.» — T. S. Kuhn, #science historian & philosopher born 18 July 1922 #HistSci 🧪 ⚛️

This black and white photo from 1977 captures Thomas Kuhn in action. A middle-aged man wearing glasses and a suit jacket, he has short dark hair and stands in front of a large blackboard, focused as he writes or draws with a piece of chalk in his right hand.

Nereide@drnereide· 25d

1/13 17 July 1894: the Catholic priest, mathematician & cosmologist Georges Lemaître was born. 🔭⚛️🧪 "Scientific progress is the discovery of a more and more comprehensive simplicity... The previous successes... give us confidence...that the universe is cognizable." — Georges Lemaître #histsci

Black and white photograph of Georges Lemaître in the early 1930s. He is shown from the chest up, wearing a dark priest’s cassock and thin metal glasses. He looks slightly to the right with a calm expression.
(Archives Louvain)

Unknown author

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GLemaitre30.jpg

Diagram illustrating the expansion of the Universe. It shows flat slices of space at different times, becoming larger as time moves upward. The image uses two spatial dimensions to represent how space itself expands over time.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Universe_expansion-en.svg

Nereide@drnereide· 26d

1/12 John Baez et al. have just published a paper linking decades-old #mathematics to a new way of thinking about quantum mechanics. 🔭🧪⚛️ The result? The Standard Model (SM) of particles seems to emerge naturally from certain mathematical structures. Here’s a simple explanation, I hope. #physics

Colorful diagram showing the known elementary particles of the Standard Model. It groups quarks, leptons, force carriers and the Higgs boson, with labels explaining their interactions. The image illustrates how particles relate through the electromagnetic, weak, and strong forces in today's universe.

Image credit: Matt Strassler.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/2j96ja2x

Nereide@drnereide· 27d

1/8 15 July 1943 – Jocelyn Bell Burnell was born. In 1967 she discovered #pulsars.🔭 🧪⚛️ The 1974 Nobel Prize went to two men. Not to her. As of 2025 data, women are just 2.2% of Physics Nobel winners. J. B. Burnell isn't an exception. Her case is still the rule. #histsci #WomenInSTEM

Jocelyn Bell (Burnell) pictured at the Mullard Radio Observatory in 1967 with the pulsar chart, left.

Image courtesy of the Cavendish Laboratory.

https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/discovery-bell-burnell-pulsar-chart

Nereide@drnereide· 29d

1/5 In the past, I've posted two images of NGC 2359, but I find this version by Adam Block particularly attractive.🔭⚛️🧪 Popularly called Thor's Helmet because of its helmet-shaped with wing-like appendages, NGC 2359 is an emission #nebula spanning about 30 ly across. apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap17110...

Image of Thor's Helmet (NGC 2359), an emission nebula with a blue helmet-shaped central region and reddish wing-like extensions. Filamentary gas and dust structures are visible against a starry background.

Nereide@drnereide· Jul 12

1/7 This video shows a large #ammonite #fossil about 71 million years old, with a well-developed iridescent layer. The specimen comes from Southern Alberta, Canada and illustrates a case of exceptional shell preservation. 🧪 ⚛️ #geology #Paleontology #science

Nereide@drnereide· Jul 9

1/11 In late June 2026, a paper in Nature by Labini & Galoppo using data from the DESI project claimed to have found anisotropy (directional differences) in the #Universe on scales up to 1 gigaparsec (about 3.26 billion ly). 🔭 This would have challenged the standard ΛCDM model.⚛️ 🧪 #cosmology

This is a slice from DESI’s large 3D map of the Universe. You can see galaxies and quasars as bright points spread above and below the Milky Way. Earth sits in the center of the view. A black area blocks the light from behind our own galaxy. The small inset shows the web-like pattern of galaxies and voids. The farthest light we see here left its source 11 billion years ago.
Credit: Claire Lamman / DESI collaboration.

Nereide@drnereide· Jul 8

1/6 This breathtaking, composite view 🔭 refers to the full moon rising on 10 July 2017 across outer Boston Harbor. The historic lighthouse Boston Light is well visible in the foreground. Image credit: Babak Tafreshi ➡️ apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap17071... ⚛️ 🧪 #sciart #science #astrophotography

It's a composite photo — they took several shots as the moon was rising and put them together in one image. It shows the full moon rising over Boston Light, the old white lighthouse in Boston Harbor. The moon appears three times in the frame — low near the water, then a little higher, and higher still.
In each one it looks really large and has that strong pink-orange glow. The white lighthouse stands out on a small rocky island, with a couple of small buildings right beside it. The whole thing is set against a deep blue twilight sky over the water. It’s a way to show the moon’s rise all in one picture.

Nereide@drnereide· Jul 7

1/8 #OTD in 1752, Joseph M. Jacquard, a silk weaver and inventor from Lyon (France), was born. His use of punched cards to control complex patterns would later provide the crucial programming concept for Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine. #histsci 🧪 #computing #science #tech

Series of punch cards on the Jacquard hand loom in the Textiles Gallery at the Science and Industry Museum. These cards were used to automatically control the weaving of complex patterns.

Credit: Science Museum Group Collection.

https://www.scienceandindustrymuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/jacquard-loom

Woven silk portrait of Joseph-Marie Jacquard, the inventor. The detailed image was created entirely on a Jacquard loom using thousands of punched cards.

Science Museum Group Collection.

https://www.scienceandindustrymuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/jacquard-loom

Nereide@drnereide· Jul 5

1/8 5th July 1687 is often cited as the publication date of Isaac Newton’s “Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica,” one of the masterpieces of modern science.⚛️ 🧪 🔭 But is it really so? Image source➡️ cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/PR-ADV-... #histsci #Principia #Newton #science

The image shows the title page of Isaac Newton’s personal annotated copy of the first edition of the Principia.

It includes the official imprimatur granted by Samuel Pepys, then President of the Royal Society, dated 5 July 1686, and the publication year 1687.

Nereide@drnereide· Jul 4

1/5 "You cannot hope to build a better world without improving the individuals. To that end each of us must work for our own improvement, and at the same time share a general responsibility for all humanity..." — #MarieCurie, née Maria Sklodowska She passed away on 4 July 1934.⚛️ 🧪🔭 #WomenInSTEM

Nereide@drnereide· Jul 3

1/6 This image lets us observe light emitted by a dying star about 1500 years ago. Gemini North🔭, on Maunakea in Hawai‘i, captured NGC 1514 — the Crystal Ball Nebula — in detail: a shell of gas ejected during the final stages of a star’s life.⚛️🧪 noirlab.edu/public/news/... #astronomy #galactic

This is the Crystal Ball Nebula (NGC 1514) , a glowing shell of gas with bumpy, irregular edges in shades of blue and white. A bright double star sits at its center . Located 1,500 light-years from Earth in Taurus, the image comes from the Gemini North telescope on Maunakea.

Nereide@drnereide· Jun 30

1/9 What if the particles that make up you, your coffee 🧪⚛️, and entire galaxies🔭 followed rules written with “strange” numbers that don’t follow the normal rules of multiplication (remember the commutative & associative properties you learned in school)? Sounds crazy, but it might be pure #math.

Standard Model of Elementary Particles diagram. It displays the different types of fundamental particles: quarks and leptons on one side, and the force-carrying bosons including photon, gluon, W and Z bosons, plus the Higgs boson.

Courtesy of Wikipedia 'Standard Model of Elementary Particles' by MissMJ, based on work from PBS NOVA, Fermilab, Office of Science, United States Department of Energy, and the Particle Data Group.

Nereide@drnereide· Jun 27

1/10 In 1946, physicist Scott E. Forbush made a quiet but important discovery about the Sun’s far reach. 🔭 He provided the first clear evidence that our star can accelerate particles to high energies and send them all the way to Earth. 🧪 ⚛️ #histsci #astronomy #solarphysics #science

Nereide@drnereide· Jun 26

1/3 🔭🧪⚛️ This splendid pic by Soumyadeep Mukherjee shows a fascinating atmospheric phenomenon: the Belt of Venus, or Venus's Girdle, captured over several Himalayan mountains. apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap23062... It appears as an arch of pinkish light⤵️ #science #sciart

A beautiful twilight pic taken in the Himalayas that shows several snow-covered mountain peaks. Mount Everest is visible second from the right. Above the mountains there is a clear dark bluish-gray band right over the horizon — that’s the shadow of the Earth. Just above this dark band there’s a striking pink-orange band called the Belt of Venus. The photo is splendid and the colors of the twilight are vivid and well separated.

Nereide@drnereide· Jun 24

1/8 #JWST found that the chemistry of the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS is strikingly different from any #comet formed in our Solar System. 🔭 Extremely high deuterium levels and unusual carbon ratios suggest a probable growth scenario dating back to 10–12 billion years.🧪⚛️ esawebb.org/news/weic2613/

Infographic that compares the chemistry of the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS with normal comets from our Solar System. The top part shows carbon isotope ratios — our comets sit around 90–100, while 3I/ATLAS is much higher, around 150–170. The bottom part shows heavy hydrogen (deuterium) in water — our comets are all very low, but 3I/ATLAS is about 30 times higher. This highlights how different the comet is from anything formed here.

Nereide@drnereide· Jun 23

1/8 "This is only a foretaste of what is to come, and only the shadow of what is going to be." — #AlanTuring, The Times (11 June 1949), “The Mechanical Brain” Today marks the anniversary of his birth. 🧪⚛️ www.turing.org.uk/publications... #histsci #histmath #ScienceSky #computing #math

Black and white passport photograph of a 16-year-old Alan Turing, facing forward with a barely smiling expression. He has neatly combed dark hair and is wearing a dark jacket over a light shirt with a tie.

Nereide@drnereide· Jun 22

1/6 22 June 1864: the great mathematician Hermann Minkowski was born. He developed a new view of space & time, coupled together in a four-dimensional space-time continuum, known as the "Minkowski spacetime".⚛️🧪🔭 mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/... #histsci #histmath

Portrait of Hermann Minkowski
Public Domain
Via Wikimedia Commons

Light cone in 2D space plus a time dimension, more commonly referred to as ‘space time’. Vertical axis represents time, horizontal axis represents spatial dimension. At the center, an event marked 'OBSERVER' is intersected by a flat horizontal plane labeled 'hypersurface of the present'. From this event, two light cones open: the future light cone upward and the past light cone downward.

Nereide@drnereide· Jun 20

1/18 A giant underground eye is spying on elusive particles…and it has already made a big result! JUNO — a huge sphere with 20,000 tonnes of transparent liquid buried in China — delivered impressive #antineutrino measurements with its first 59 days of data (late 2025). 🔭🧪⚛️ juno.ihep.cas.cn

Exterior view of the JUNO detector, a massive spherical neutrino observatory buried underground in China. The image shows the large stainless steel structure and supporting infrastructure of the 20,000-tonne liquid scintillator detector.
(Official photo from the JUNO Collaboration)

Nereide@drnereide· Jun 18

1/8 This JWST’s NIRCam and MIRI stunning image reveals different structural details of the Crab Nebula (NGC 1952). Image Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, T. Temim (Princeton University) science.nasa.gov/missions/web... #galactic #universe #astronomy 🔭🧪⚛️

View of the Crab Nebula taken by the James Webb Space Telescope. It has green, magenta and blue areas with some yellow and white parts mixed in.

Nereide@drnereide· Jun 17

🧵1/11 #Venus tesserae aren’t all ancient?🔭 A new study (June 2026) proposes that at some highland margins, tessera is still forming today by deforming relatively young volcanic plains.🧪⚛️ ➡️ agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/... #planetsci #geology #science

Image: Figure 1 from Byrne et al. (2026).
(a) Magellan radar image of the western margin of Alpha Regio tessera.
(b) Global map of Venus tesserae (in purple) on a Magellan radar mosaic. The two major highlands, Aphrodite and Ishtar Terrae, are labeled.

Nereide@drnereide· Jun 15

2/7 The research team analyzed Cassini data from ice grains in the E ring (coming from water plume erupted from Enceladus’s subsurface ocean), which revealed fingerprints of soluble phosphate salts. Article: www.swri.org/press-releas...

Scientific illustration showing Saturn with its E-ring highlighted. Its small icy moon Enceladus is visible, with a water plume erupting from its south pole. In the lower right, a mass spectrum from Cassini’s Cosmic Dust Analyzer displays clear peaks of sodium phosphate salts. Title at the top reads: 'Phosphorus, rarest ingredient for life, discovered at Saturn’s moon Enceladus'.

Credit: Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) / Cassini Cosmic Dust Analyzer / Postberg et al. (Nature, 2023)

Nereide@drnereide· Jun 15

🧵1/7 If you missed this major discovery: in 2023, scientists re-analyzing Cassini data found phosphorus — a key building block for life — in the subsurface ocean of #Enceladus, Saturn’s icy moon. 🔭🧪⚛️ One of the most important astrobiology findings in recent years. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The backlit E ring, with Enceladus silhouetted against it. The moon's south polar jets erupt brightly below it.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Source: https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/?IDNumber=PIA08321

Nereide@drnereide· Jun 13

🧵1/3 In this splendid photo, we can see an example of #pareidolia*: an exceptional olive tree, found in Ginosa, Puglia, Italy. It is know as "the thinking olive tree" because we perceive a human figure in its trunk. 🧪🔭 epod.usra.edu/blog/2019/12... 📷Marcella Giulia Pace #sciart #photography

This long-exposure night time photo captures a massive, very ancient olive tree in Ginosa, Puglia (Italy), resembling somehow an elderly figure lost in thought. High above and to the left, the constellation Cygnus stands out against the starry sky.

Nereide@drnereide· Jun 11

2/5 Noctis Labyrinthus (the labyrinth of the night) is located near the Martian equator in the heart of Tharsis upland, at the western end of the Valles Marineris. Image: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:No...

Global mosaic of 102 Viking 1 Orbiter pics showing Noctis Labyrinthus (circled) near the Martian equator. The whole globe of Mars is visible.

The image is in the public domain.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Noctislabyrinthusviking1.jpg

Nereide@drnereide· Jun 11

🧵1/5 This fascinating Viking 1 image features Noctis Labyrinthus at sunrise, when the canyons of this region on #Mars appear filled with water ice fog (possibly) from frost sublimated by the early morning sun.🔭🧪⚛️ photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA0... Credit: NASA/JPL/USGS #histsci #planetsci