Cosmic Batman

Analyst. Exploring science, technology, art, weather, space, and the unusual. Stay curious.

[Cosmic Batman @Johndawtcom]

When you look up at the night sky, you are not seeing the universe as it is. You are seeing a collage of the past. The Moon you see is about a second old. The Sun, eight minutes. The nearest star, over four years. Some faint smudges are galaxies whose light left before Earth had complex life. Look far enough and you see things as they were before the Sun existed. There is no way to see the sky as it is right now. Distance is a time machine, and it only points backward. Every clear night, you are staring into deep history and calling it stargazing.

[Cosmic Batman @Johndawtcom]

How is there sound though??

[Cosmic Batman @Johndawtcom]

The dome of a great cathedral holds itself up with almost no glue and no steel. Every stone leans on its neighbors, and the whole weight flows down through the arches into the ground. Pull one keystone and it could fall. Leave them all in place and it stands for a thousand years. It is a machine made entirely of pushing.

[Cosmic Batman @Johndawtcom]

You cannot tickle yourself, and the reason is a little unsettling. Your brain constantly predicts the result of your own movements and quietly cancels the feeling, so your own touch never surprises you. Tickling needs surprise. Your brain is always one step ahead of your own hands.

[Cosmic Batman @Johndawtcom]

You can breathe underwater or you can fly, but only one, and for the rest of your life. Which do you take?

[Cosmic Batman @Johndawtcom]

For most of history no one knew what was at the bottom of the sea, and the guesses were wrong. People assumed the deep ocean was a dead, still desert, too dark and crushing for anything to live. Then we sent cameras down. We found forests of tube worms taller than people, feeding on the chemicals of volcanic vents. Fish that glow. Whole food chains that never touch sunlight. There is more living space in the deep ocean than in every forest, field, and desert on the surface combined, and we have seen almost none of it. The largest habitat on Earth is the one we understand the least.

[Cosmic Batman @Johndawtcom]

There is a cloud in space, thousands of light years away, that holds enormous amounts of alcohol. Real alcohol molecules, drifting between the stars, built by chemistry in the cold and the dark. The galaxy is a stranger place than any bar.

[Cosmic Batman @Johndawtcom]

Glass is a strange in-between. It is rigid like a solid, but its atoms are jumbled like a liquid that froze before they could line up into a crystal. Scientists still argue about how to classify it. The window near you is something physics does not have a clean name for.

[Cosmic Batman @Johndawtcom]

What is a small everyday object that is secretly a marvel of engineering once you look closely?

[Cosmic Batman @Johndawtcom]

The reason your keyboard starts with QWERTY is a problem that no longer exists. Early typewriters jammed when common letters were struck in quick succession, so the layout was scrambled on purpose to slow typists down and split up frequent pairs. The jamming vanished over a century ago. The workaround stayed. Faster layouts exist and almost no one uses them, because billions of us already learned the old one. Sometimes the world does not keep the best design. It keeps the first one everybody agreed on.

[Cosmic Batman @Johndawtcom]

A blue whale's heart weighs about as much as a grand piano, and when the whale dives its heartbeat can slow to two beats a minute. You could count the long pause between beats.

[Cosmic Batman @Johndawtcom]

Down where no sunlight has ever reached, life did not give up and go dark. It started making its own light. Some of these animals have never once been touched by a ray from the Sun.

[Cosmic Batman @Johndawtcom]

You can send one sentence to everyone alive 500 years from now, and it is guaranteed to survive. What do you write?

[Black Hole @konstructivizm]

The most massive black hole?

The size of the black hole TON 618 is 194 billion kilometers.

[Cosmic Batman @Johndawtcom]

This drop of glass can take a direct hammer strike on its bulb without a scratch. Molten glass dropped into cold water freezes under enormous internal stress, squeezed tight at the surface and stretched at the core. Nick the thin tail end though, and the whole drop disintegrates into powder in a fraction of a second. 📷 Mg3kc at English Wikipedia / Wikimedia Commons

[Cosmic Batman @Johndawtcom]

Guess which came first on Earth: sharks, or trees.

Sharks won this one by a wide margin. Sharks have been swimming for about 400 million years. The first trees did not appear until tens of millions of years later.

So somewhere out there, ancient sharks were already patrolling oceans on a planet that did not have a single tree yet. What is another pairing where the order surprises you?

[Cosmic Batman @Johndawtcom]

The stars are aligning.. make it count!

[Michael Bradbury @MrMBB333]

SIX PLANETS ARE ABOUT TO SHARE THE SKY

Something incredible is about to unfold before sunrise…

On July 17, Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune will all appear along the same stretch of sky in a rare planetary parade. While Uranus and Neptune will require binoculars or a telescope to see, this will still be one of the year’s most impressive skywatching events.

👇 If you catch this rare lineup, come back and share your photos in the comments!

#MrMBB333 #PlanetParade

[Space 8K @uhd2020]

A black hole tears apart a neutron star!

[Cosmic Batman @Johndawtcom]

There is a thread packed inside almost every cell in your body that is longer than you will ever be. Uncoil the DNA from a single cell and it stretches about two meters, thin enough to stay invisible, folded down into a nucleus you could not see without a microscope.

Now multiply that by the trillions of cells you are made of. Laid end to end, the DNA in your body would stretch from Earth to the Sun and back, not once, but many times over. You are, quite literally, carrying enough molecular thread to cross the solar system's own front yard and return home again and again.

And it all fits inside you, coiled so tightly you never feel its length at all.

[Science girl @sciencegirl]

Raindrops ignite

What bioluminescence looks like In the rain