Representative Clark has made an appropriate response.
bsky.app/profile/whip...
Representative Clark has made an appropriate response.
bsky.app/profile/whip...
I had not expected that to show up when I searched for some details of the dinosaur-killing asteroid impact.
09.03.2026 17:12 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Re. last repost of @tadethompson.bsky.social :
I discovered a couple of days ago that Google Scholar has started indexing young-Earth creationist pseudoscience in with actual science.
So Google continues to both actively and passively degrade the value of their primary product.
I had to school a student on how bad google is on medical matters today.
Them: [Thing] doesn't exist.
Me: *produces direct citation*
Me: Yeah, it does.
Them: Ooohh...it didn't show up on my google search.
Me: There's your problem right there.
(Thing=fairly common diagnosis.)
🚨 Boule de feu au-dessus de l'Europe le 8 mars 2026
À 18 h 55 CET, le dimanche 8 mars, une boule de feu a traversé le ciel de la Belgique, de la France, de l'Allemagne, du Luxembourg et des Pays-Bas, brillant pendant environ six secondes avant de se fragmenter. 🧪🔭
🎥 Allsky7
The large majority of the fireballs given advance notice by @vrubinobs.bsky.social will be over the southern hemisphere, complementing ongoing surveys that mostly give notice of fireballs in the north.
Most of them will also be over deep ocean, which will impede the collection of meteorites.
Today on the #arXiv:
Chow et al. 2026, "Predictions of Imminent Earth Impactors Discovered by LSST" - arxiv.org/abs/2603.05587.
Detailing how @vrubinobs.bsky.social will double the discovery rate of very small asteroids before they make harmless fireballs.
Accidentally timely given Koblenz‑Güls.
If you want to add to the nearly 3000 reports of that fireball that the IMO has collected: fireballs.imo.net/members/imo_...
09.03.2026 16:44 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
🚨 UPDATE: fireball over Europe – 8 March 2026
At 18:55 CET on Sunday, 8 March, a very bright fireball streaked across the skies of Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands, glowing for around six seconds before fragmenting. 🧪🔭
🎥 Allsky7
bsky.app/profile/squi...
09.03.2026 16:42 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0bsky.app/profile/spie...
09.03.2026 16:42 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
Being a former-Catholic atheist:
An unwillingness to claim to believe things that I do not.
Last I heard, Greg Bovino was getting thrown out of restaurants in Vegas. But that was a month ago.
lasvegassun.com/news/2026/fe...
Pixelated image with four darker pixels circled in green, representing asteroid 2024 YR4 as seen by JWST in infrared.
#PPOD: JWST successfully observed the extremely faint near-Earth asteroid 2024 YR4 (circled in green) on 18 February 2026 with its Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam).
By analyzing the asteroid’s position relative to background stars whose locations are very well known, astronomers were... 🧪 🔭
When we talk about genocides in the U.S., there are the many genocides of tribal nations that have been ongoing for centuries. There is also the genocide of Black people, the conditions of which have never gone away. This can be useful historical context for things happening now.
09.03.2026 14:53 — 👍 125 🔁 33 💬 2 📌 0More crime. #ImpeachTrump
09.03.2026 16:09 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Composition is secondary to size when considering deflection; since asteroids' densities only vary by a factor of a few while their masses vary by many orders of magnitude.
But it certainly matters for predicting what KI deflection would do, tuning nuclear deflection, or fueling a gravity tractor.
There is a standard plot sorting out the preferred deflection method by impactor diameter and warning time (www.nationalacademies.org/read/12842/c...).
Nuclear deflection is very unlikely to ever be needed, since we have ruled out short-notice impacts by any large impactors.
That would be radiation pressure deflection (momentum from reflected versus absorbed sunlight) rather than Yarkovsky deflection (momentum from absorbed sunlight re-emitted in the infrared).
But they necessarily happen at the same time as one another, just in different directions.
@andrewjonesspace.bsky.social
Isn't a 2033 launch pretty soon unless the Pu-238 has already started to be manufactured?
Busy night for fireball reports over Germany.
And a busy day for meteorite searches around Koblenz.
fireballs.imo.net/members/imo_...
Passing stars certainly perturb the Oort Cloud; but that increases the number of comets for the next tens or hundreds of millions of years rather than making brief showers.
The claims of comet showers in the 1980s were based on a supposed periodicity to mass extinctions on Earth, but there is none.
That the K-Pg impactor was a carbonaceous chondrite asteroid has been understood since the late 1990s; when Frank Kyte found the first fossil meteorite: www.nature.com/articles/24322
09.03.2026 02:14 — 👍 4 🔁 2 💬 1 📌 0
I encountered a popular-science book from 2015 at my local public library today that promoted those misrepresentations (as well as pretending that there is a dark matter disc in the Milky Way, which there is really not).
I assume that the librarians simply did not read more than the title.
This is a reminder that the K-Pg mass extinction was precipitated by the impact of a carbonaceous chondrite asteroid; not a comet.
And perturbations to the Oort Cloud do not create showers of comets.
Today in things I thought had been adequately explained back in the 1990s...
I have only ever heard "coh-spar".
08.03.2026 23:55 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0Historians are quite capable of explaining the hellscape that is the US at this particular minute, and its kind of telling that you imagine we won't because it means you haven't been listening or reading
08.03.2026 16:54 — 👍 732 🔁 177 💬 16 📌 4
I have had to explain the differences between nuclear winter, volcanic winter, impact winter, and aerosol cooling from fires before.
I hate that that is now relevant again.
My earlier post was not to suggest Janet Mills for Senate from Maine instead.
It was to suggest that more better candidates should run.
Which remains a perennial problem everywhere in the United States.
Pixelated black and white Voyager photo of Io, showing a plume from a volcanic eruption.
Voyager 1 captured the first evidence of an extraterrestrial volcanic eruption #OTD in 1979, on Jupiter's moon Io.
The plume in this image was discovered by astronomer Linda A. Morabito, working as a JPL engineer at the time, and announced a few days later. 🔭 🧪 👩🔬
Image: NASA/JPL
