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NASA Predicts Asteroid 2024 YR4 Might Hit The Moon.

According to observations made by NASA using the James Webb Space Telescope, there is a three point...

Basically No chance 2024 YR4 will hit Earth.

Recent observations have virtually eliminated any concern about an impact from asteroid 2024 YR4...

Asteroid 2024 YR4: A 2032 Threat? Not on Our Watch

Back in December 2024, astronomers caught wind of something unusual—a small, fast-moving rock...

No, Trump’s Executive Orders Can’t Cancel Your Rights.

Donald Trump does not have the power to rescind either constitutional amendments or federal laws...

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Hontas FarmerRSS Feed of this column.

My research focuses on astrophysics from massive star formation to astroparticle physics. Born and raised in Chicagoland I have lived in Bellwood, IL since 1984 and attended public schools here... Read More »

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Real astronomical images rarely look like their artist representations.  The images produced by the Event Horizon Telescope will be no different.  That said, an image of the light near the event horizon of the black hole at the center of our galaxy will be many times more detailed than the famous image of a similar black hole from the galaxy M87.  The main reasons for this are distance and improvements in the instrument.  M87 is about 53 million light years away.  While the center of our own galaxy, Sagittarius A*, is just about 26,000 light years away.  

Veritasium is still wrong by his own standards because he did not give the full real explaination which is rooted in the real theory of electricity and magnetism.  Quantum Electro Dynamics.  In fact with that theory in hand the way this works out is more straight forward.

It is very unlikely that Fermilab’s new findings on the mass of the Wboson mean that the standard model is broken. It will be exciting if it does. This is not to say that their experimental findings are wrong. Fermilab themselves propose the much more likely possibility that we need to compute the predicted values more precisely in the standard model. Another possibility that occurs to me is that we scientists need to both compute the values predicted by established theory even more precisely and also extend the established theory a little bit.

Don't Look Up did not win an Oscar tonight.  Generally, I don't care about the Oscars but then Will Smith legit slapped Chris Rock so hard that it made the Russo-Ukrainian war stop trending.

The harsh truth of nuclear war in our modern era is not that everyone would die right away but that hundreds of millions would die in the combatant states while hundreds of millions would have to survive radiation and starvation. If you are one who sees the flash, has time to Duck and Cover, and for whom the light is distant you are not in the clear. Instead, soon fallout will be upon you a deadly black rain, and black ash will be upon you. How to survive this if you have not prepared at all up to this point? Dirt and Distance are your friends.

Given the invasion of Ukraine and how both the US and Russia regard the ISS with deep pride our abandoning it would send a strong message to Russia.  There is no moral or ethical way to continue the ISS program as if nothing has fundamentally changed in the world.