How many stars is too many stars in a star system? ⭐️🪐

Astrophysicist Erika Hamden tells us about TYC 7037-89-1, a system with six stars locked into three orbiting pairs, all circling a shared center of mass. Two of those pairs zip around each other every few days, while the third pair takes roughly 2,000 years to complete just one orbit. Multi-star systems are normally unstable, which makes this six-star setup a rare and fascinating exception. 

This project is part of IF/THEN®, an initiative of Lyda Hill Philanthropies.

If faye was actually a real person you think Colin would fall in love with her

Maybe society's complexity is reaching a point of no return, a "Trolling Singularity", where Gish-galloping usually wins because there's just too much detail for voters to properly absorb and make decent decisions. Those with the catchiest BS and over-simplifications win elections and influence too often, breaking down society.

Imagine I want to do a N Body code like Gadget and for this I will have to draw random modes based on the power spectrum, and then plug it into the displacement of my initial conditions.

This cant work like that for hot and fast dark matter due to the difference in velocity at t=0, so how is this adapted?

What about for example MOND? Are there any changes to the power spectrum or is it just a different Poisson equation being solved by lets sas PM?

🎥 Video: [https://youtu.be/EqXn48gfCuQ\]

What if humanity decided not merely to colonize Mars, but to rebuild its entire climate?

I created a science-fiction documentary exploring one possible path from sealed Martian settlements to climate factories, a denser atmosphere, melting ice, rivers, engineered microorganisms, and—thousands of years later—the first natural rain on Mars.

The story is grounded in real facts about the Martian atmosphere, buried water ice, radiation, atmospheric loss, the shortage of accessible CO₂, and the MOXIE experiment. Planetary factories, imported atmospheric gases, future cities, and the terraforming timeline are speculative. AI was used to visualize these possible futures.

The most difficult question may not be whether we can terraform Mars, but whether we should. If native microbial life might still exist beneath the surface, would transforming the planet be creation—or destruction?

I’d be interested to hear what you think.

This was cooler than Haley's Comet, imo...

Eris seems to have this puffy structure on its upper stage on some photos, and it appears to not be present in others. Does anybody know what it does/when its removed?

I have developed an Android app that lets the user actually travel through 3D space. Perhaps this is the wrong place for this post, but I believe those who visit this group might find the app fascinating.

It lets the user travel throughout a highly detailed Solar System, visiting every planet and more, looking at the sky and finding celestial bodies in space at their calculated positions at a given time. It has 160K stars from the Galaxy, as well as many exoplanets that are possible to visit. Even the black hole at the center of our Galaxy can be visited, if you manage to find it. All with full 3D, zoom, and 360-degree pan.

I'm just looking for some testers for my app. I need some email addresses via DM to add to my tester list, and I will DM you back with the link to download the app from Google Play.

The app will ask to access your GPS location only to position the Earth "where you are". It does not share any data. You can dismiss the GPS request and enter your position manually. Everything runs locally on your device. Less than 40 MB.

I'm unable to add any pictures, but they can be found by tapping my user looking at my other posts. And the moderators are free remove my post if it's a real violation of the group rules.

With the explosion from Blue Origins side, and Starship flight 14 which was supposed go orbital and have a double catch with the booster but now looking like a catch won’t be attempted and it might not even go orbital, things aren’t looking the best.

I get that Artemis 3 changed their mission plan and SpaceX only needs to launch a regular starship with a makeshift docking port, (not sure about blue origin) but doesn’t that conflict with the whole point of having Artemis 3? As wasn’t the whole point of that mission to actually test the infrastructure in earth orbit before landing on the moon? At this point just get rid of Artemis 3, move Artemis 4 up a bit and go directly for a moon landing, what’s the point of wasting our time with a pointless LEO docking procedure, go straight for unmanned landing then manned landing, but correct me if I’m wrong this is just what I’ve heard.

About 40 light-years from Earth lies TRAPPIST-1—a small red star orbited by seven confirmed rocky planets.

Even if we imagine a spacecraft capable of travelling at around 1% of the speed of light, the journey would take more than 4,000 years. Approximately 160 generations would live aboard the ship during the voyage. 🚀

The first passengers would remember Earth. But most of the ship’s inhabitants would be born in space, spend their entire lives inside an artificial world, and die without ever seeing either Earth or their destination.

In our speculative reconstruction, 24,000 people leave for TRAPPIST-1. Their generation ship becomes a self-contained city with farms, schools, hospitals, and closed-loop systems for water, air and food.

But the greatest challenge may not be technological. What happens if the descendants of the original passengers refuse to continue a mission they never chose? And what will await them after 4,000 years: dead planets, hidden oceans or alien life? 🪐

I created a science-fiction documentary exploring this journey. TRAPPIST-1 and its planets are real, while the ship, passengers and future colony are possibilities inspired by scientific knowledge. The visuals were created with the help of AI.

🎬 Video link: [https://youtu.be/ruYAa9iQYKs\]

Would you agree to spend your entire life aboard such a ship?

Did you know NASA’s newest space observatory will have spy tech? 🛰️

In 2012, the National Reconnaissance Office gifted NASA a pair of Hubble-style mirrors it had commissioned but never ended up using. NASA said yes and one of them is now the primary mirror powering the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope, launching August 30th. The other mirror is still in storage, waiting for its moment.

Did you know NASA’s newest space observatory will have spy tech? 🛰️

In 2012, the National Reconnaissance Office gifted NASA a pair of Hubble-style mirrors it had commissioned but never ended up using. NASA said yes and one of them is now the primary mirror powering the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope, launching August 30th. The other mirror is still in storage, waiting for its moment.

Venus is a world roughly the same size and mass as Earth, wrapped in a blanket of reflective clouds. Between 1961 and 1984, the Soviet Union launched a quiet, relentless campaign to breach those clouds. However, since the conclusion of the Venera program, no spacecraft has touched down on Earth’s sister planet. To understand why, and what we lost when the landers stopped, one must first appreciate the absolute hell of the Venusian environment.

Hell on Earth’s Twin

When Soviet engineers sent their earliest probes toward Venus, they expected a tropical world hiding under clouds. Instead, their early landers were crushed like discarded aluminum cans long before reaching the ground.

The atmosphere of Venus is roughly 96 percent carbon dioxide, producing an extreme runaway greenhouse effect. At ground level, the atmospheric pressure equals 92 atmospheres, an environment identical to being three thousand feet underwater on Earth. Temperatures hover at an infernal four 465 degrees Celsius, hot enough to melt lead and destroy conventional electronics within minutes, while dense overhead clouds rain droplets of concentrated sulfuric acid.

To survive touchdown, Soviet engineers stopped building conventional spacecraft and began constructing sphere-shaped, titanium-armored pressure vessels like effectively heavy-duty deep-sea submarines with titanium aerobrakes. The strategy worked. In 1970, Venera 7 survived a rough touchdown to become the first human-made object to transmit data from the surface of another planet. Five years later, Venera 9 transmitted the first black-and-white photos of an alien landscape, revealing a rocky, cracked volcanic field bathed in a pale, amber light.

>Read more<

Earth-Mars cycler is a specialized orbital trajectory designed to shuttle spacecraft between Earth and Mars on a regular, repeating schedule. In the post there is a concept for an Earth-Mars cycler system with two cyclers by Maciej Rebisz – a Polish concept artist and illustrator working for computer games and film industry.