Stefan Payne-Wardenaar

Technically incorrect: while 46.5 bly is the current radius of the observable universe, unless expansion slows light will be too slow to ever reach objects at that proper distance.

Thanks for the correction: I misremembered the timeframe of PMS stars.

Which reminds me of an anecdote from a geo prof: Many people once thought the Sun shone from gravitational collapse alone, until radiometric dating showed the earth was much older than the ~20my that would last!

Gemini North Discovers Long-Predicted Stellar Companion of Betelgeuse - Gemini North telescope in Hawai‘i reveals never-before-seen companion to Betelgeuse, solving millennia-old mystery Astronomers have discovered a companion star in an incredibly tight orbit around Betelgeuse using the NASA and U.S. National Science Foundation-funded ‘Alopeke instrument on Gemini North, one half of ...

Need to update my Betelgeuse model...
noirlab.edu/public/news/...

That two independent teams predicted it last year has my hopes up.

That it's supposedly a way younger pre-MS star is crazy (if true).

Urge to animate it... But I've got plenty of other work to get through first ;p

Iggy is down by the student camp / basement entrance.

<3. Carcharo? Giga?

Nice looking Milky Way at 1:55, atleast ;)

That closeup shot with the egg is by far my favorite shot from ep 1

A Tilted Dark Halo Origin of the Galactic Disk Warp and Flare The outer disk of the Milky Way Galaxy is warped and flared. Several mechanisms have been proposed to explain these phenomena, but none have quantitatively reproduced both features. Recent work has de...

Here's the paper. arxiv.org/abs/2309.07209
Tilted ~30 degrees they suggest, and probably not quite that thin (but still 'triaxial': different x, y, z lengths).
Hmm, I might be underestimating the flare in my model...

Our supermassive black hole (Sag A*) is 4.3 million solar masses... but the Milky Way is about 1.5 trillion.
Several thousand stars directly orbit the central black hole, but unlike in the solar system, things orbit the center of mass of the whole galaxy (icl dark matter whch dominates further out)

All spiral galaxies are rather flat like this, the up and down motion of gas tends to cancel out, making the thin disk of newer stars pretty thin. We can measure this directly now with GAIA, along with just the visual clue Galileo figured out that the Milky Way appears as a band.

It uses data on real stars and dust near the sun, then transitions to procedural details further out, informed by H.

It's made in Blender, using a number of base-textures constructed from data and Hubble images,then used to inform procedural volumetrics and star particles!
(it's stupid complicated)

This is my rendering. It incorporates some new data where possible (on the structure of dust near the sun, a new angle of the bar, etc), but is a best-guess for areas further out.

YouTube video by StefanPW The Galaxy Song

The two main proposals to explain the warp are that it's caused by a colliding dwarf galaxy (probably Sag dSph, seen faintly bottom left of center), or from a non-spherical dark matter halo.

YouTube video by StefanPW The Galaxy Song

I made a version of that song with my old galaxy model and some updated lyrics.
Need to make an updated one with my new model... and better singing / music ;p

youtu.be/hFGXmO5GqeQ?...

We are close to the axis of warpage, and close enough to the center that the warpage mostly doesn't affect us :)

The two main proposals are that it's caused by a colliding dwarf galaxy (probably Sag dSph, seen faintly bottom left of center), or from a non-spherical dark matter halo.

The two main proposals are that it's caused by a colliding dwarf galaxy (probably Sag dSph, seen faintly to the bottom left of center), or from a non-spherical dark matter halo stirring them up.

Stars tend to get packed exponentially closer the closer you are to the center. The brightness is from the Bulge and Bar, and the core at the very center.

There is a 4.3 million solar mass black hole (Sag A*) at the center, but it's tiny on galactic scale and the accretion disk isn't very bright.

Go for it :)

This is showing the side in visual light, and those are mostly seen in Xray so I have not included them! :)

I realized shortly before publishing this that I'd mixed up units and previously made the thin and thick disk too thin, so it's now 3x thicker than it was in my earlier versions ;)

The dust lanes are indeed that thin, though. With real 3D dust data incorporated near the center!

The two main proposals are that it's caused by a colliding dwarf galaxy (probably Sag dSph, seen faintly bottom left of center), or from a non-spherical dark matter halo.

The two main proposals are that it's caused by a colliding dwarf galaxy (probably Sag dSph, seen faintly bottom left of center), or from a non-spherical dark matter halo.

Quick timelapse of the start of the Lunar Eclipse last night!

Used a basic zoom lens on a tripod and stabilized in post, some day I'll get a fancier setup...

167 au / (8 parsecs/pixel) = 0.0001 pixels from the Sun ;)

From a forum I found this as a potential sollution?:

Under: Settings - Privacy & Security - Location

Disable notify when apps request location.

What's on the other side in the zone of avoidance is indeed just an extrapolation of how the arms seem to work elsewhere.

Gaia data gives us detailed disk structure out to 2-3 kpc from the Sun (further out in certain uses like streams), beyond that I used a mix of hydrogen data and other tracers.

I have been summoned!
(Also not an actual photo, but an actual visualization ;p)