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Leonardo Petrillo

@92sciencemusic.bsky.social
268 followers 106 following 210 posts

Physicist (MSc in theoretical physics); scientific blogger (scienzaemusica.blogspot.com); appreciator of music, especially classical-jazz. Expert and theorycrafter on some kinds of videogames, including Diablo, Hearthstone

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Reposted by Leonardo Petrillo
Nereide @drnereide.bsky.social · 20h
#NobelPrize2026 in #chemistry Kagan showed that, in certain reactions, a small predominance of a molecule’s "right-handed" or "left-handed" form (in the catalyst) can produce a much higher excess than expected. 🧪 #HistSci #Science
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Nereide @drnereide.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
Francis Halzen turned Antarctic ice into a telescope🔭 IceCube is a cubic kilometre of ice with thousands of sensors. It catches rare blue flashes when ultra-high-energy neutrinos hit nuclei. They fly straight from violent cosmic accelerators. Magnetic fields don't bend their path⚛️ #NobelPrize 🧪
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Nereide @drnereide.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
You are looking at the dunes of Endurance Crater on #Mars, in this approximate true-color panoramic camera image, highlighting the reddish-colored dust present there. What a fascinating geological phenomenon! science.nasa.gov/resource/end... 🔭🧪⚛️ #planetsci #HistSci
You are looking at the dunes of Endurance Crater, in this approximate true-color panoramic camera image, highlighting the warm reddish and golden dust present there. The dunes show sinuous sand formations that extend to heights of less than a meter.
Fine ripples texture the slopes, and the nearest sand in the foreground looks granular and close.
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Nereide @drnereide.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
From a light-seeking alga came the key to controlling single neurons in the living brain. Hegemann and Nagel’s protein, turned by Deisseroth into an optical switch, activates circuits in ms and shows how memories, emotions and actions arise. An epochal leap for #neuroscience. #NobelPrize2026 🧪
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Nereide @drnereide.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
"The history of humankind and of science teaches us that difficulties have always improved human beings. And it is precisely from imperfection that progress was born!" —R. Levi-Montalcini, int. P. Zullino, Telèma, 1998, in 'Alla scoperta dei Premi Nobel: Rita Levi-Montalcini', p. 91 🧪 #WomenInSTEM
Color portrait of elderly Rita Levi-Montalcini, framed from the upper chest up, white hair swept back, wearing a black top with a distinctive brooch at the center, and a slight smile.
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Nereide @drnereide.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
19 January 2007, natural color. Not a single frame: 36 wide-angle shots from #Cassini, assembled later. Spacecraft was ~1.23 million km from #Saturn. Image scale 70 km/pixel. -> science.nasa.gov/photojournal... 📷NASA/JPL/SSI 🔭🧪⚛️ #planetsci #histsci #astronomy #science
Saturn is centered in the wide oval of its rings, on black. Half the globe is pure white, overexposed; a thin twilight line divides it from the dark night side.
The rings are beige, pale brown and dark brown, with many fine concentric bands. Saturn’s shadow cuts across them as a solid black wedge extending to the right.
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Nereide @drnereide.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
This is one of the largest images #JWST has ever put out. IC 348 is a stellar nursery about 1,000 light-years away in Perseus. Shot in 2024; public view of a 2025 paper. The image release is from 2026: esawebb.org/news/weic2619/ 🔭🧪⚛️ #stellarastro #stars
Image Description from ESA: A star-forming region. It is blanketed in thick clouds of gas and dust, millions of kilometres across, that form swirling patterns. Bright stars are scattered throughout the clouds, with the densest cluster situated in the centre of the scene. Each is crowned with six long points created by the optics of the telescope’s mirrors. In the upper right, a couple of hidden stars blast out long, glowing jets of material.

https://esawebb.org/images/weic2619a/
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Nereide @drnereide.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
#OTD in 1901, #EnricoFermi was born. His scientific work stands out for originality and range. He was an exceptional scientist, capable of lightning-fast intuitions, but also a tireless worker, deeply human towards colleagues, students, family, friends. A thread.⤵️ ⚛️🔭🧪 #HistSci #Physics
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Nereide @drnereide.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Think you know Jupiter? In ultraviolet light, it can look like almost another planet. Dark poles, a dark Great Red Spot, one bright oval that fades. #Hubble reveals clouds and hazes the eye cannot see. 📷NASA, ESA, Hubble, Judy Schmidt apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap18101... 🧪🔭⚛️ #planetsci #astronomy
Jupiter sits big and round against black. This is near-ultraviolet, false color.
Bands run across the disk in cyan, pink and muted brown instead of the usual cream and orange. The poles look darker  brown with slightly pinkish clues. On the left side of the planet a large storm, the Great Red Spot, is also dark rather than red. Just to its right a smaller oval that would look white in visible light is similarly dark. Farther right a chain of storms, the String of Pearls, stands out bright pink.A small round disk at upper left, off the planet’s limb, is Ganymede.
A thin credit line at lower right reads NASA, ESA, Hubble, Processing: Judy Schmidt.
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Nereide @drnereide.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
This extraordinary image was created by reprocessing & merging 16 frames from Voyager 1's flyby of Jupiter in 1979. Just right of center, you can see the Great Red Spot, a huge storm system. ➡️ apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap20062... Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/A. Tranchandon 🔭🧪⚛️ #histsci #planetsci
Voyager 1 view of Jupiter. Banded clouds wrap the planet in beige, cream & pale brown. Just right of center sits the Great Red Spot, an oval storm flushed orange-red. Lower left, the bright disk of Europa is visible. Upper right, a round dark patch marks Io’s shadow on the cloud tops.
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Nereide @drnereide.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Any convex quad can look like a square if you choose the right viewpoint. That’s the video. #MathSky #iTeachMath 🧪
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Matt Henderson @matthen.com · 24/09/2026
every (convex) quadrilateral is a square- if you view it from the right perspective
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Nereide @drnereide.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
This is a stunning lunar corona, visible in Death Valley. A corona is an optical phenomenon you may see when thin clouds partially veil the Sun or the Moon. Photo: Arpan Das Source: epod.usra.edu/blog/2021/08... 🔭🧪⚛️ #sciart #science #optics
A night landscape in Death Valley. In the foreground the playa is dry and cracked. The ground is broken into blue-grey plates of mud or salt, divided by dark fissures. Near the bottom center one crack forms a wide, almost round shape, like a plate that has split. Some of those surfaces pick up a faint gloss from the moonlight.A dark mountain range sits farther back, low and uneven against the sky. The Moon is high and very bright. The disk is overexposed, almost a white glare. A lunar corona surrounds it. First comes a bright aureole. Outside that the colour changes. Near the Moon it is bluish-white. Then green. Then yellow. At the edge there is a faint pink-violet rim. The rings stay soft and run into one another.
Thin, streaky clouds drift across the sky, partly veiling the Moon and helping form the corona. The night sky offers a magical view. The whole scene is cast in cool blue tones, quiet and wide.
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Nereide @drnereide.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
At some 53 Mly, by the Virgo Cluster, sit galaxies whose surface light sits close to the sky level. Few stars, spread over a huge area. A study of Rubin LSST DP2 data reports 7 of them, around galaxy M49. Image: Fig. 1 of the paper. NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin data (DP2). 🔭 🧪 ⚛️ #cosmology
Figure composed of seven side-by-side panels, each a crop of the night sky from the Vera Rubin telescope. Each panel shows one of the seven galaxy candidates in the paper. Across the dark field sit many stars of our own Galaxy. They look like sharp points, some brighter, some fainter, and they are not the galaxies named in the title. Those stars are in the foreground. Each panel has a pale patch in the middle. The edges fade out. That patch is a rarefied dwarf galaxy: few stars over a wide area, so it does not read as a sharp disk or a spiral. It looks oval or almost round, dull, gray or gray-yellow. Six of them stay small in the frame. AD 7, the last one, takes more of the frame and looks fainter. It is a wide, dim blot and does not stand out from the background as clearly as the others. The color is stacked and false. It is there only to show objects that would otherwise stay almost invisible. Each panel has a scale bar at the bottom. One arcminute is about 4.7 kiloparsecs — roughly 15,000 light-years — if the galaxies are at the Virgo Cluster distance. North is up. East is to the left.
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Nereide @drnereide.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
For the 1st time, an extrasolar planet has left a radio fingerprint of its own, distinct from its star’s. 🔭 That fingerprint also tells us how strong its magnetic field is.⚛️ The planet is called β Pictoris b.🧪 Illustration Credit: ESO/L. Calçada/N. Risinger (skysurvey.org) #planetsci #astronomy
Artist’s impression (not a photograph) of the young giant planet β Pictoris b. A large, banded gas world fills the foreground, lit in warm orange-reddish and brown, with a bright young star  farther back against a starry sky. 
Artwork from 2014, made for the first measurement of the planet’s spin, not for the radio detection. 
 
Source: https://www.eso.org/public/images/eso1414a/
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Nereide @drnereide.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
You've probably read that an OpenAI system has "solved" a #MillenniumProblem on the fluid equations. The headline is strong. Better to ask: which problem, under which assumptions, and what would still be open. 🧪⚛️ #mathsky #science #NavierStokes
Von Kármán vortex streets appear on the lee side of Peter I Island in this image acquired with the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 8 on February 11, 2026.
 
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison

https://science.nasa.gov/earth/earth-observatory/a-sea-of-spinning-clouds/
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Nereide @drnereide.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
This photo isn't the usual diamond ring. On 2 July 2019, from Cerro Tololo in Chile, during the total #eclipse the Sun stayed visible at two points at once. The rather uncommon effect looks like a "double diamond ring". 🔭🧪⚛️ Credit: CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/D. Munizaga #astronomy #science
Black disk of the Moon on a dark sky. On the upper limb, two close, very bright points of sunlight with diffraction spikes. Weak glow around the Moon. Some pink on the edge. Shot at Cerro Tololo during the 2 July 2019 total eclipse.
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Nereide @drnereide.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
14 September 2015 went down in #history. That is, in fact, the day the #LIGO researchers first detected a #gravitationalwave signal, formally named #GW150914. journals.aps.org/prl/abstract... #cosmology #histsci #blackholes 🔭 🧪 ⚛️
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Nereide @drnereide.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Rafael Sorkin (1945–2026) combined theoretical depth with a rare intellectual curiosity. A pioneer of causal set theory, he pictured spacetime as a locally finite set of events in which causal order and number give rise to geometry. He leaves a profound absence. RIP. 🧪 🔭 ⚛️ #physics #histsci
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Nereide @drnereide.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
You are admiring #Saturn together with three of its moons: Titan at the upper right; the shadow, seen as a black dot, of Rhea transiting; Tethys transiting within the shadow cast by the rings. Author: Gabriele D'Orazio -> www.instagram.com/p/C9iXP21MYFi/ 🧪🔭⚛️ #sciart #astrophotography
Color photograph of Saturn against a black background. The planet appears as a pale cream-and-beige sphere with faint horizontal atmospheric bands. Its thin, sharp rings run diagonally from lower left to upper right, showing a dark Cassini Division and casting a narrow dark shadow across Saturn’s disk. A small black circular spot on the planet’s face is the shadow of the moon Rhea in transit. Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, is visible as a small tan disk in the upper right, well separated from the planet. A tiny point of light, the moon Tethys, is transiting precisely inside the shadow cast by the rings on the left side of the image.
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Nereide @drnereide.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
A Nobel as a shield for working women. "I would be particularly happy if the distinction awarded to me could [...] safeguard women's most precious right: to practise, on the same terms as men, the professions for which they are qualified." ― Irène Joliot-Curie, born #OTD in 1897. 🧪⚛️ #WomenInSTEM
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Nereide @drnereide.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
It’s a useful warning beyond #mathematics as well: when the tool delivers the final result without going through the process that generates judgment, new questions, and transmission, intellectual work is hollowed out even if it still "works." 🧪🔭⚛️ #mathsky
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Nereide @drnereide.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
It’s not a summer that "came too soon." It’s a summer already sitting in the 2020s range — treated as if no one could have seen it coming. The models didn’t need to persuade. They needed to bind. Between the simulation and the construction site there is only a decision. #climate 🧪 ⚛️ #science
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Nereide @drnereide.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
"If I were king, I would redress an abuse which cuts back, as it were, one half of human kind. I would have women participate in all human rights, especially those of the mind." ― Émilie Du Châtelet, passed away #OTD in 1749 I reshare this thread. 🧪 ⚛️ #histsci #WomenInSTEM #MathSky #EduSky
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Nereide @drnereide.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
The scene that comes next is worth the whole thread on its own: the Kaiser walks in, the octopus thrashes, she is accused of cruelty. "We may tolerate heartless research in American women, but our sympathetic German women would refrain from such cruel occupations!"🧪 #HistSci #WomenInSTEM #science
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Predrag Cvitanović @chaosbook.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
OpenAI proposed solution to The Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem openai.com/index/navier...
openai.com
On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem
We’re sharing an AI-generated solution to the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem, including a writeup and a formal proof in Lean.
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Nereide @drnereide.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
🧵 Cosmic scales are awkward to teach with figures alone. They stay abstract. Animations like this can give a sense of how large the #MilkyWay is, and of the distance to the nearest exoplanet. Video by NASA/JPL-Caltech🔭🧪⚛️ science.nasa.gov/universe/exo... #astronomy #science
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Nereide @drnereide.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
🧵 Very dense stars, such as old millisecond pulsars and white dwarfs, could harbor a tiny #blackhole as massive as a truck. A new study does not assume it exists: it calculates what would follow if that seed could form.🔭🧪⚛️ phys.org/news/2026-09-black-hole-tons-star-dark.html #cosmology
This artist's concept shows a pulsar, which is like a lighthouse, as its light appears in regular pulses as it rotates. Pulsars are dense remnants of exploded stars, and are part of a class of objects called neutron stars.

photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA21085

PIA21085

Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech
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Nereide @drnereide.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
🔭⚛️🧪 Hawking wasn’t a saint, and he wasn’t just a narcissist. He was a formidable physicist and often an unbearable man. The problem is that the wheelchair myth turned his flaws into legend.
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Nereide @drnereide.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
"My independence, which is my strength, implies loneliness, which is my weakness." (Pier Paolo #Pasolini, from 'The chaos') A deep thought that concerns the fragility and also the strength of the human soul. #BookSky #poetry #quotes
Black and white photograph of Pier Paolo Pasolini, in a suit and tie, turning toward the camera from a desk piled with books, notebooks and papers.

Source: https://www.rai.it/ufficiostampa/assets/template/us-articolo.html?ssiPath=/articoli/2021/01/Su-Radio-Techete-Pier-Paolo-Pasolini-Appunti-musicali-5961e52c-d493-4078-9ec9-70a6652985d5-ssi.html
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Sean Carroll @seanmcarroll.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
Claude has produced a formalized proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem. Of course FLT had already been proven by Andrew Wiles, but this proof is simpler, and “formalized” means machine-verifiable. The news isn’t the proof, but the form. Still too long to fit in a page margin, though.
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Nereide @drnereide.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
1/14 At #Saturn’s south pole a powerful wind belt doesn't run straight: it bends into 10 sides. That bend is an atmospheric wave, visible in the clouds. #Hubble has watched it take shape since 2023. It is not like the northern hexagon: it is younger, uneven, and still forming.🔭🧪⚛️ #planetsci
Hubble, 29 August 2025: two frames of Saturn. The one on the left is a side-on globe — yellow banding at the equator, orange-pink farther from it, a bluish cast near the poles, rings cutting across.

Right: looking down on the south pole, tan and orange rings of cloud around a darker center with a ten-sided outline. A dashed circle and an X at the pole mark where Hubble did not take data.

Credits: NASA, ESA and STScI, with A. Sánchez-Lavega (UPV), A. Simon (NASA-GSFC) and M. Wong (UC Berkeley).
Processing: A. Pagan.
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Nereide @drnereide.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
1/10 The LUX-ZEPLIN experiment — LZ — sits in a South Dakota mine. In the liquid xenon it caught one unusual flash. A hint of #darkmatter? It’s far too soon to celebrate. Here are the facts — with the caveats. ⚛️🧪🔭 newscenter.lbl.gov/2026/09/01/l... Image by M. Kapust / Sanford Research Facility
Technician in a white clean suit stands on a metal platform beside a large white cylindrical detector, several metres tall, with photomultiplier tubes around the top rim and bundles of copper cables at the base, inside a stainless-steel laboratory.
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Nereide @drnereide.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
1/12 Under Gran Sasso (Italy), a detector built for dark matter has seen the Sun’s faintest neutrinos: a very light knock on an electron (elastic scattering). It is the lowest energy threshold ever reached for detecting any #neutrino.⚛️🧪🔭 www.physics.columbia.edu/news/xenonnt... #physics
Illustration from the XENONnT paper.
 
From the left: the Sun, then a plot of the solar neutrino spectrum. The XENONnT tank sits in the middle, with two flashes labelled S1 and S2. Earth is over on the right. Dashed lines follow the neutrinos from the Sun into the detector and on toward Earth.
The new low-energy part of the measurement is drawn in red.

By XENON Collaboration, Figure 1
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Nereide @drnereide.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
1/3 New method: gas in SMOG2, next to the VELO, LHCb’s detector pinpointing where the collision happens. Same proton beam, two gases: hydrogen (protons at rest) and argon (a nucleus). Same energy, so you can compare “with a nucleus” and “without”. ⚛️🧪🔭 #physics
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Nereide @drnereide.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
1/16 What if #stringtheory wasn't a complicated invention of physicists... but the only thing that could emerge from a few basic rules? A new study from Caltech (and collaborators) says just that. Let's see what it's all about.🔭🧪⚛️ - www.caltech.edu/about/news/s... #physics #science
Diagram from the APS journal Physics. On the left, two particles come in and two go out in a four-point collision. On the right, the same process is shown as the particles behaving like closed strings.

Credit: APS / Alan Stonebraker

Source: https://physics.aps.org/articles/v19/88
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Nereide @drnereide.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
🧵 That blue is not the true colour of the sand as a standard observer would see it on the surface. 🔭🧪⚛️ HiRISE colour products are usually enhanced IRB composites (IR, red and blue-green bandpasses displayed as R, G and B), with a strong per-channel contrast stretch. 1/4
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Nereide @drnereide.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
The bright white crescent is exactly where it should be: the northern limb still in penumbra. 🔭🧪 The rest is almost entirely in umbra. Beautiful. #Moon #LunarEclipse
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Nereide @drnereide.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
1/2 This stunning shot by Chris Kotsiopoulos captures the total lunar #eclipse of 15 June 2011. 🔭 Storm clouds nearly ruined the view, but they parted just in time during totality — and the result was pure magic.⚛️🧪 apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap21052... #astrophotography #nature #sciart
Rocky hills rise dark in the foreground, framing a calm stretch of sea. A heavy stormy sky takes over most of the view in deep purples and blues. Bright branching lightning bolts slash through the clouds, their light bouncing clearly off the water. High up and far to the right, a small reddish disk of the total lunar eclipse rests quietly among scattered stars.
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Nereide @drnereide.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
1/10 TON 618 is an enormous #quasar, a type of extremely luminous active galactic nucleus (AGN) at the center of a #galaxy.🔭 Its engine is one of the most massive black holes known. QSO 1228+3128 is one of its alternative designations.⚛️🧪 #cosmology #universe #astronomy
A large dark circular silhouette fills most of the frame, edged by a thin glowing orange ring that looks a bit like a halo against a starry black background. White text near the top reads “TON 618” and blue text reads “2606 AU Diameter.” In the exact centre a minuscule point, highlighted by a white arrow, marks the approximate size of our solar system, about 80 AU across, so small it almost vanishes inside the huge black circle.
Illustration from u/ElectronicRhubarb841
Image source: Reddit
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Nereide @drnereide.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
1/4 #Science is the only way we can approach the world without claiming to own it. 🔭 It is not a repository of certainties, nor a court that issues definitive sentences. 🧪 Rather, it is a continuous and laborious pact between our curiosity and the limits of our vision.⚛️
Silhouette of a hooded person seen from behind, looking up at a dense field of stars and the glowing band of the Milky Way in a dark night sky.

Photo by Sharad Bhat on Unsplash
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Nereide @drnereide.bsky.social · 22/08/2026
Double #rainbow, taken by me at sunset, after a storm.🔭 The sky in the background is still cloudy. Between the primary rainbow, with more intense colors, and the secondary one, with weaker and inverse colors, we see Alexander's dark band.⚛️🧪 #photography #nature #science
After the storm at sunset, a double rainbow crosses the still-cloudy sky. Right in the foreground, more toward the center-right, stands a big leafless tree whose dry twisted branches stand out dark against the sky.
To the left, part of a white building with a ventilation opening and some leafy green trees appear. The brighter primary rainbow shows strong colors from red on the outer edge to violet on the inner; above it, a fainter secondary rainbow displays the colors in reverse order. Between the two arcs lies the darker band known as Alexander’s dark band. The signature “Nereide” is visible in the lower right corner.
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Nereide @drnereide.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
1/8 A team, led by researchers at #MPE and the Paris Observatory/PSL, detected S301, the closest star around Sgr A*, the BH at the heart of our Galaxy. 🔭🧪 It orbits in 8.7 years and its peak velocity reaches about 25,000 km/s, so being faster than any known star in the Milky Way.⚛️ #cosmology
Four-panel figure of GRAVITY near-infrared images showing the area around Sagittarius A*. Panels a to d display an annotated sequence of observations from 2021 to 2025, reconstructed using the GRAVITY-RESOLVE method.
The orbital path of star S301 is overlaid. In panels c and d, Sgr A* and star S62 appear blended due to Gaussian smoothing. Panel a also marks a possible source labelled SX that has not been re-detected.  

Credit: GRAVITY+ Collaboration / Nature (2026)
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Nereide @drnereide.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
1/12 The BGV theorem states that an expanding #universe cannot extend infinitely into the past: it must have had a beginning in time.🔭 But is it really that simple? A recent paper explores the link between this theorem and the energy conditions of general relativity.⚛️🧪 #cosmology #histsci
Planck satellite map of the cosmic microwave background — the afterglow of the Big Bang. What you’re looking at are minute temperature fluctuations that existed when the universe was still very young. These tiny variations eventually led to the formation of galaxies.

Author: ESA / Planck Collaboration.
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Nereide @drnereide.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
1/8 In 2025, I reported the discovery of MoM-z14, the most distant galaxy confirmed spectroscopically, a result of the JWST "Mirage or Miracle" (MoM) program led by R. Naidu & collaborators.🔭⚛️🧪 They have just published another great result from the same program in Nature: MoM-BH*-1. #cosmology
Three-panel scientific illustration comparing different astrophysical objects. Left panel shows a soft azure sphere with a yellow core, representing a normal star as a dense ball of gas powered by nuclear fusion. Center panel shows an intense azure disk with a small black spherical core, representing a black hole growing by consuming matter through a pancake-like accretion disk. Right panel shows a bright red multi-layered gaseous envelope surrounding a small black spherical core with a yellow halo, representing a black hole star: a nascent black hole enshrouded in dense gas that radiates in a star-like manner, with the accreting black hole acting as the power source and the surrounding gas serving as a pseudo-photosphere.

Image credit: iStock; Jose-Luis Olivares, MIT.
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Nereide @drnereide.bsky.social · 16/08/2026
Not just an incredible pic — a perfect blend of scientific precision, telescopic technique and aesthetic sensibility. The spiral turns a timeline into something almost poetic, capturing the shift from partial phases to the sudden magic of totality. 🔭🧪⚛️ #eclipse #sciart
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Nereide @drnereide.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
1/9 #Gluons are the mediators of the strong force: they hold together the #quarks inside protons and neutrons. Unlike photons, however, they can stick together. This property has led researchers to search for nearly 50 years for a particle made only of gluons: a #glueball. ⚛️🧪 #physics #histsci
Scientific diagram comparing the decay patterns of the lightest 0^{-+} glueball and the ηc meson. The figure shows similar decay channels and branching ratios between the two particles, highlighting their resemblance.

Fig. 2 from: Shan Jin, “BESIII discovers a glueball-like particle X(2370) in J particle decays”, Nuclear Physics B 1028 (2026) 117495.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nuclphysb.2026.117495
(CC BY 4.0)
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Reposted by Leonardo Petrillo
Nereide @drnereide.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
1/7 Combined data from Chandra, #Hubble, and #Webb show this chaotic environment of young stars, hot gas, and dust.🔭 It is about the Tarantula Nebula, or 30 Doradus, a giant H II region in our Local Group.🧪⚛️ A new study explains why the energy from the stellar winds isn't all staying inside.
Cropped view of the Tarantula Nebula’s colorful core. Translucent layers from Chandra (wispy blue hot gas), Hubble (curling green hydrogen tendrils), and Webb (roiling red dust and young stars) overlap and blend harmoniously into vivid fiery oranges, golden yellows, and deep purples.
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Reposted by Leonardo Petrillo
Nereide @drnereide.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
1/3 This contribution by John C. Baez is a small masterpiece of clarity. In six posts, he manages to do three very rare things: 1. He tells the true story of #antiparticles (with all the errors, coincidences, and photographic plates that got flipped over) without mythologizing it; ⚛️🧪🔭 #physics
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Reposted by Leonardo Petrillo
Nereide @drnereide.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
1/9 In 2019, a Warsaw research team presented the first 3D map of the Milky Way in the journal Science. The map is based on direct distances to thousands of Cepheids. A pioneering achievement, still widely cited. 🔭🧪⚛️ #galactic #astronomy #universe
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