Science Art Empire

Where science, AI and art collide.
Visual stories from the edge of the known unknown.

[Science Art Empire @Siccuma]

SHOEMAKER-LEVY 9

July 16–22, 1994. Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 hit Jupiter in about 21 pieces.

Nobody photographed this angle. We saw the bruise later. One fragment of dirty ice struck at ~60 km/s and threw a plume ~3,000 km high. The darkest scar was nearly as wide as Earth.

#ShoemakerLevy9

[Science Art Empire @Siccuma]

WHITE DWARFS PICK ONE GAS. THIS ONE DIDN’T.

Most remnants wear hydrogen or helium, not both.
Janus rotates in a quarter of an hour and shows a different sky with every turn.
Named for the two-faced god. Caught, maybe, in the act of changing skins.

[Science Art Empire @Siccuma]

ONE STAR. TWO ATMOSPHERES.

JANUS
ZTF J2033+3229
Transitioning white dwarf
~1,300 ly away in Cygnus
Radius ~3,400 km — Earth-sized
Mass ~1.20–1.27 solar masses
Spins once every 14.97 minutes

One hemisphere: almost pure hydrogen (~34,900 K).
The other: almost pure helium (~36,700 K).
As it turns, the spectrum flips. Hydrogen lines. Then helium. Then hydrogen again.

Same corpse of a star. Two faces.

#Janus #WhiteDwarf

[Science Art Empire @Siccuma]

@JosephEkene12 Glad it landed. 3I/ATLAS is already on the way out - same sky, different nursery.

[Science Art Empire @Siccuma]

NOT FROM HERE. Older than the Sun.

3I/ATLAS
Third known interstellar visitor
Origin: possibly ~10–12 billion years
Path: hyperbolic — in, through, out
Speed: ~221,000 km/h

It did not form with us. Ice from another, older part of the Galaxy cut across the Solar System and is already leaving. Same sky. Not the same origin.

#3IATLAS

[Science Art Empire @Siccuma]

A fair reading of Muhibullah, Irwin & Di Stefano (Nature Astronomy).

They pulled 84 “hypersoft” X-ray sources from the Chandra archive - M101, M31 and four ellipticals. Soft X-rays only, after long exposures; the extreme UV is inferred. Seven of the M101 sources are the red circles.

They are almost certainly accreting binaries. Which compact object sits in the middle is still open; a white dwarf is the authors’ lean. Type Ia precursors, and a share of the ionizing budget in the host galaxies, are possible roles - not yet measured ones.

New class in the catalogue. Nature still to be named.

[Science Art Empire @Siccuma]

THE SUN IS 4.6 BILLION YEARS OLD. THIS ICE MAY BE TWICE THAT.

Two earlier visitors: 1I/ʻOumuamua, 2I/Borisov.
This one is the biggest and brightest of the three.
It never belonged to this system. It only used the road.

[Science Art Empire @Siccuma]

A sharp Galileo pair - orbit E17, 26 September 1998.

Left is chaos: plates that broke, drifted and froze again. Right is older ridged plains. The lakes-in-the-shell idea (Schmidt et al., 2011) is the best current reading of how those plates formed - warm water pooling under the ice until the roof gave way. It is a model that fits the topography, not a photograph of the lakes.

Fourth of Jupiter’s moons, sixth in the Solar System. Same world Galileo named in 1610. The ocean is still inferred. Clipper will test it.

[Science Art Empire @Siccuma]

The wink is an eclipse. The extra stars are still a fit, not a census.

XZ Andromedae is an Algol pair: A4 + G5, period 1.357 days, edge-on from here. The cooler star crosses the hotter one and the combined light drops.

APOD is repeating Yuan & Qian (2019): slow wiggles in that period can be modelled with two further stars on ~33- and ~100-year orbits. Mass transfer in the close pair, and magnetic cycles, can mimic the same wiggles. Two stars are certain. Four are allowed. They have not been seen.

[Science Art Empire @Siccuma]

A few million kilometres closer to the Sun - and still colder at night.

Venus never gets that break. The blanket doesn’t come off.

[Science Art Empire @Siccuma]

Mercury closer, but Venus HOTTER?

Mercury sits nearer the Sun — and still freezes at night (~−180 °C). Dayside hits ~430 °C. Venus is farther out and stays ~465 °C, day and night.

Why: Mercury has almost no air. Heat arrives and leaves. Venus is wrapped in a thick CO₂ atmosphere. Sunlight gets in; infrared cannot get out. The planet keeps the heat.

#Venus #Mercury

[Science Art Empire @Siccuma]

The ESO numbers hold: RCW 120 is about 4,200 light-years toward Scorpius, the bubble about ten light-years across.

An O8 star, CD−38°11636, ionises the inside. The shock piles cold dust into the red rim; those clumps are where the next stars are condensing. APEX saw the cold gas in 2008. The red is the nursery. The hole is the wind.

[Science Art Empire @Siccuma]

@AstroDanziger Two years on, Andrea - well earned.

Kosmos did what you said it would: three lives, and the sky as the thing they hold onto. Masi’s preface was the right door into that.

Still on the shelf. Still worth the evening. Congratulations! 👍😎

[Science Art Empire @Siccuma]

A strong candidate for Bondi–Hoyle–Lyttleton feeding - not a photograph of the hole.

Li et al. (arXiv:2608.10719) point to an off-centre object in UGCA 320, about 20 million light-years out. Broad Balmer lines in 2021 imply a compact mass of order 35,000 Suns. The gas is thin ahead, denser behind, and the lines faded and flickered through 2025 - consistent with clumps in a wake crossing the line of sight.

That is how a wandering intermediate-mass black hole can eat while it moves. The mass is a line-width estimate. The wake is the argument. Both need more epochs before this becomes the textbook example of how such holes grow on their way to a galactic centre.

[Science Art Empire @Siccuma]

The nebula is the corpse.
The pulsar is the heart that would not stop.

[Science Art Empire @Siccuma]

In 1054 a star died so violently its light was visible in daylight for weeks.

What remains is the Crab Nebula: wreckage still expanding at ~1,500 km/s — half a percent of light speed. It spans ~11 light-years and sits ~6,500 light-years away.

At the center: the Crab Pulsar. A neutron star the size of a city, spinning ~30 times per second. One of the brightest persistent gamma-ray sources in the sky.

A thousand years later the explosion has not finished moving.

#CrabNebulaM1

[Science Art Empire @Siccuma]

The discoverers and the age of the stars are right. The travel time is not.

NGC 6541 (Caldwell 78) was found twice in 1826: Niccolò Cacciatore on 19 March, James Dunlop on 3 July. It is a metal-poor inner-halo globular, about 23,000–25,000 light-years away, mass ~570,000 Suns, age ~12.9 billion years.

That age is how long the stars have lived. The light in the Hubble frame left only twenty-odd thousand years ago. Earth was already here. The cluster is ancient. The snapshot is not.

[Science Art Empire @Siccuma]

The lensing is right. Two labels need a tighter date and name.

The cluster is SDSS J1226+2152 at z ≈ 0.44. The inner red arc is SGAS J122651.3+215220, a Lyman-break galaxy at z ≈ 2.93 — light from when the universe was about two billion years old. TEMPLATES (JWST ERS, Rigby) took the NIRCam frame on 16 December 2022, not 19 December 2023.

The yellow ovals are cluster members. The arcs are background galaxies, stretched because the cluster’s mass — stars, hot gas, and dark matter — bends the path. The light is not attracted to the arcs. The arcs are the path.

[Science Art Empire @Siccuma]

A fair reading of Novais et al. (Nature Communications, 2026) — with the usual “likely.”

PDS 70 is real: ~370 light-years, ~5.4 million years old, two imaged giants. JWST saw water vapour in the inner disk. HARPS then showed sodium lines that appear and vanish in nights, only partly cover the star, and move faster than the star.

That pattern fits icy bodies on stretched orbits sublimating as they pass close in. It does not prove those bodies carried the water JWST saw. The giants can scatter outer-disk ice inward; that is the proposed route, the same idea we use for the early Earth.

Youngest proposed exocomets around a cool star. Still a preferred model, not a delivery receipt.

[Science Art Empire @Siccuma]

A fair sketch of the paradox.

Classically the horizon hides a singularity and the information looks gone. Quantum mechanics does not allow that loss. Hawking radiation was the crack in the door; whether the radiation actually carries the information out is still the fight.

What we image is only the shadow and the photon ring. The interior is a boundary condition, not a photograph.

[Science Art Empire @Siccuma]

NGC 1360 - the Robin’s Egg, in Fornax.

The distance is a range, about 1,150–1,800 light-years; 1,500 sits in the middle. At those values the nebula is a few light-years across, a little larger than the usual one-light-year planetary.

The nucleus is a 142-day binary: a hot central star and a white dwarf, confirmed in 2017. The shell is mainly the envelope of the star that just left the asymptotic giant branch. The companion was already compact. Common-envelope history, not two simultaneous ejections.