iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Dr. Raphael Marschall @spacemarschall.net · 29/07/2026

see the lead author's thread on this: bsky.app/profile/impo...

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Reposted by astrafoxen

We are used to seeing weird shapes of small asteroids, but this is next level! look at the shape of 44 Nysa from Minker et al. This is 75 km volume-equivalent diameter object! Also it has a satellite! #planetSci 🧪

Residuals of R-band images of the Nysa system on 2026-
02-15 after processing with the blind deconvolution method of
Appendix A.3. The position of the satellite is marked with a pink
arrow. To improve the S/N, the deconvolution residuals were av-
eraged with a a ±5 frame sliding window. To provide scale, the
primary has been superimposed. An extended video version of
this figure and the same processing for the 2026-03-21 dataset is
available online.

Source: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.25786

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yep! The paper says there's a shape model on the DAMIT website, but it hasn't been uploaded yet... (damit.cuni.cz/projects/dam...) For now the paper has a preview of the model fitted to multichord occultations.

Shape model of Nysa (green) fitted to occultation chords (black with red ends) from 2017 Oct 9.

Shape model of Nysa (green) fitted to occultation chords (black with red ends) from 2017 Sep 19.

Shape model of Nysa (green) fitted to occultation chords (black with red ends) from 2007 Jan 10.

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Holy... I remember being shocked by those Io images when I saw the LBT press release in 2024. I'd love to know what other stuff it's been looking at!

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Interestingly, even though Nysa is part of a collisional family of asteroids (the Nysa-Polana complex), the asteroids in that family don't share Nysa's enstatite-rich (E-type) composition (see Tatsumi et al. & Minker et al. 2026). Now I want to spend the next few days reading more about Nysa...

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voyager16751.bsky.social @voyager16751.bsky.social · 11/07/2026

Amazing #arXiv pull today with new direct imaging of asteroid 44 Nysa. I just wanna say- WOAH WHAT THE HEY WTF IS THIS ASTEROID SHAPE?? What's with all those concavities?? And holy crap it's apparently a contact TRINARY with a half-kilometer-sized moon??? arxiv.org/abs/2607.25786

Surface features identified on Nysa in the 2026-02-15 SHARK-VIS dataset. Edge indentations are marked with pink ovals and shadowed features are marked with purple arrows. Each feature is marked with a corresponding letter; the measured size and description of these features can found in table 5 as shown below:

Feature Type Width (km) Depth(km)
A Crater/secondary basin 38 6
B Crater 20
C Crater 35
D Crater 21 3
E Southern cavity * 53 17
F Northern cavity 44 5
G Crater 17
H Crater 8
I Collum/Valley
J Collum/Valley

Image of the Nysa system taken by the Large BInocular Telescope on 2026-Feb-15 after processing with a blind deconvolution method. The position of the moon is marked with a pink arrow.

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Reposted by astrafoxen

Hello everyone! My name is Voyager, and I’m an animation and game design student from Texas. My passion is with space, hard sci-fi, worldbuilding, and alternate history. I use Autodesk Sketchbook as my main software - and it has been for 9 years. Commissions are open! Info is in a separate post

Solar System Portrait - Studies made from 2025-2026

black hole art study - drawn in October 2025

“To the Moon We Go!”, art piece drawn in celebration for Artemis 2’s launch in April 2026.

WALL-E, 18th anniversary piece - drawn in June 2026

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(please check out the commentaries by Michael Busch and Elizabeth Tasker) bsky.app/profile/mich... bsky.app/profile/eliz...

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Second photo of an asteroid released today! This time it comes from JAXA's Hayabusa2 mission, which flew by Torifune yesterday. It's a 300-meter-wide contact binary rubble pile. It looks uncannily identical to Itokawa, another asteroid visited by JAXA's first Hayabusa mission back in 2005. ☄️🔭

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It looks so similar to Itokawa!

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Smallest asteroid ever photographed up close, and WOW I've never seen anything like this before!! No obvious craters and very jagged shape. Just a single, 30-meter-long chunk of solid rock, unlike other asteroid visited by space probe.

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that makes me wonder… why don't scientists edit Wikipedia? is it because there's no incentive/time? Barrier to entry too high? (i agree with last part… wiki is hella wordy and guideline-heavy. idk why they don't tell you right away) I'm genuinely curious to hear what people have to say. (12/12)

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Plus, Wikipedia articles practically last indefinitely unlike most websites, which change domains & die out in a few years. A wiki article may suck, but any change to it is a net improvement. (except contentious/political topics, i don't edit those. idk about them) (11/12)

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I know trying to improve Wikipedia's countless articles is a Sisyphean task that sucks up time, but I still find it rewarding to just learn and share info to the world, especially through a website that always shows up first in Google/websearch (and uhh, also where AI gets most of its info) (10/12)

Of course it doesn't end here, as there's still tons of interesting space objects whose wiki articles still need improvement. The articles for dwarf planets Eris and Haumea currently suffer the same outdated/jank issues Makemake once had, and I've been thinking of fixing those too. (9/12)

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I'm really glad to have revamped Makemake's wiki article into a proper complete compendium. I hope more people appreciate this underrated dwarf planet! Makemake's cryovolcanic hotspot and Pluto-like terrain especially fascinate me :3 (lowkey i think Makemake is more interesting than Eris) (8/12)

Once finishing the Makemake article, the last step was to send it through Wikipedia's "Featured Article Review", a rigorous peer review process for checking whether an article is good enough (grammar, accuracy, etc.) for feature on the Main Page. After 2 months of review, the article passed! (7/12)

A screenshot of the Wikipedia discussion page on the Makemake article's Featured Article Review. The first message was by Wikipedia user "Nrco0e" on 7 November 2025. The discussion ended on 10 January 2026 with the article keeping its featured article status, as declared in the above message by user "FACBot".

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In the end, I made over 700 edits and expanded the article to 2x its original size (you can see how the size exploded in the graph lmao) I did most of my editing in a separate draft for other ppl to review, since I didn't wanna annoy wiki admins with my rapidfire edits. It all worked out :) (6/12)

A graph showing the size of the Makemake Wikipedia article (orange curve) over time, from 2005 to 2026. The article size in bytes is indicated by the vertical axis on the right side. The same plot also shows a bar chart displaying the number of edits (blue), minor edits (green), and edits by unregistered users without accounts (red). The edit count is indicated by the vertical axis on the left side.

In the graph, you can see that both the edit count (blue bar) and article size (orange curve) jump up in 2008 and 2025. The edit spike in 2008 happened because Makemake was officially named in that year. The edit spike in 2025 was caused by me rewriting and expanding the article, which can be seen by the huge size jump.

The graph can be viewed here: https://xtools.wmcloud.org/articleinfo/en.wikipedia.org/Makemake

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The fun part about writing Wikipedia articles is that you uncover TONS of fun obscure stuff while researching. Like apparently the discoverer once called Makemake "Dead Pope"?? And it was photographed right next to a giant galaxy before it was discovered? (genuinely that image goes so hard) (5/12)

A color image of Makemake (white dot in yellow circle) above a gigantic yellow, disk-shaped galaxy. In addition to these, white dots and gray fuzzy blobs (background stars and galaxies) pepper the black void of space. Makemake appears indistiguishable from a regular star, as both are so far away that they appear as white dots.

This photo was taken by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey on December 13, 2004, four months before Makemake's discovery. This pre-discovery photo was not noticed by astronomers until 2015.

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Naturally I tried fixing the wiki article myself, but while doing so, I spotted more and more flaws which annoyed me so much that I decided to rewrite the entire thing from scratch. I had lots of college free time, so I got totally distracted rewriting the article. (dw, i did my schoolwork) (4/12)

A screenshot of the old Makemake article's History section, annotated with colored boxes, underlines, and text to highlight various flaws in the writing, sourcing, and formatting. Some of the complaints written in the screenshot include: "holy run-on sentence", "why is this paragraph a single sentence?", "source does not say this", "baseless speculation lmao", "acronym not introduced", and "citation needed".

A screenshot of the old Makemake article's Orbit and Physical characteristics section, annotated with colored boxes, underlines, and text to highlight various flaws in the writing, sourcing, and formatting.

A big red text exclaims "HOLY SANDWICHING" with horizontal red arrows, in reference to the article's inconsistent text width caused by differently-sized images compressing (aka "sandwiching") both sides of the article. In Wikipedia, "sandwiching" text between images is frowned upon.

The screenshot shows additional smaller colored text annotations complaining about other issues with the article; these read: "this article is about Makemake, not Haumea", "not quite the actual definition", "very old and unreliable source", "all in one section??", "why is the old diameter mentioned before the current one?", "jargon", "which is correct?", "redundant orbit diagram", "22.83 hr now doubted, also why mention 7.77 hr?", "sudden jargon", "mag not introduced and linked", and "why bring up the outdated hypothesis first?".

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In September 2025 I got super interested in Makemake because two big news happened: JWST found methane gas on Makemake and @renerpho.bsky.social published the first analysis of its moon. That got me to check its wiki page, only to be disappointed by how much of a disaster it was. (3/12)

The Makemake article used to be short, outdated, and really janky. It was mostly written in 2008, with some new stuff tacked on awkwardly by randos. Usually wiki articles on major Solar System objects are pretty comprehensive, but it seems like wiki editors didn't give Makemake much love :( (2/12)

A screenshot of an old version of Wikipedia's Makemake article, dated 18 August 2025 (before I rewrote the article). A big red text spelling out "BEFORE" in all caps is pasted at the top center of the screenshot.

On the left side, a table of contents is shown, listing out the names of sections in the article. The table of contents is very short and the names of its sections are often wordy. For example, there is one section named "brightness, size, and rotation." Located in the middle are the contents of the actual article. The right side shows a photo of Makemake, illustrated in a black box with a white dot.

A screenshot of the newest version of Wikipedia's Makemake article, dated 15 June 2026 (after I rewrote the article). A big red text spelling out "AFTER" in all caps is pasted at the top center of the screenshot.

On the left side, a table of contents is shown, listing out the names of sections in the article. The table of contents is very long and extends to the bottom of the screenshot. In the middle, the writing of the actual article is shown. The right side shows a photo of Makemake, illustrated in a black box with a white dot.

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astrafoxen @astrafoxen.bsky.social · 13/06/2026

Last year I rewrote Wikipedia's article on Makemake and it's now featured on the front page!! i spent 2 months hyperfixating on this topic and doing all the research and writing. It was SO worth it :D Special thanks to @renerpho.bsky.social & others for reviewing it ^^ (1/12 thread) 🔭 #planetsci

A screenshot of the "Today's featured article" section on the Main Page of Wikipedia. The section, highlighted in green, features an excerpt from the Wikipedia article on Makemake:

"Makemake is a dwarf planet orbiting the Sun beyond Neptune. It has a diameter 60% that of Pluto, and is the fourth-largest trans-Neptunian object and the largest member of the Solar System's classical Kuiper belt, a disk of icy bodies beyond Neptune's orbit. Its discovery on March 31, 2005, by American astronomers Mike Brown, Chad Trujillo and David Rabinowitz at Palomar Observatory contributed to the reclassification of Pluto as a dwarf planet in 2006. Makemake's surface, like Pluto's, is largely covered by frozen methane and stained reddish-brown by tholins. It has one known satellite, unnamed, whose orbit suggests that Makemake's rotation has a high axial tilt. Makemake shows evidence of geochemical activity and cryovolcanism, which has led scientists to suspect that it might harbor a subsurface ocean of liquid water. No high-resolution images of its surface exist because it has not been visited up close by a space probe."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makemake

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Just survived a whole year of undergrad E&M and quantum mechanics, yaaaay now to worry about applying for grad school and figuring out where to go and what to do :(

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astrafoxen @astrafoxen.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

VLT imaged Halley at V=28.2. I don't think HST did image it. There's also Bernstein et al.'s 2003 HST pencil-beam TNO survey that found 2003 BH91 at V=28.38. I can't seem to find any deeper pencil-beam surveys though, except that 2024 JWST sub-km asteroid paper that didn't give mags...

nature.com

JWST sighting of decametre main-belt asteroids and view on meteorite sources - Nature

Combining the infrared capabilities of JWST and synthetic tracking techniques, the detection of some of the smallest asteroids ever observed in the main belt is reported; their large abundan...

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Reposted by astrafoxen

GamGyuls @gamgyuls.bsky.social · 24/05/2026

Commissioned painting for Tailnoms!

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Reposted by astrafoxen

thunkii.bsky.social @thunkii.bsky.social · 14/05/2026

This is a graph of the inclination vs semi-major axis (distance from the sun) of 1,249,051 asteroids in the asteroid belt. Using proper elements allows us to see the belt's fine structure, including asteroid families that are fragments of past collisions. Each asteroid is (roughly) to scale.

A plot of 1,249,051 asteroids within the asteroid belt, showing (proper) inclination vs semi-major axis (in AU) and orbital period (in years). The size of the circles is proportional to the diameter of each asteroid. The main asteroid belt is shown in shades of white, while Hungaria asteroids are in orange and the Cybele asteroids are in blue. Red markers note the position of the 1:4, 1:3, 3:8, 2:5, 3:7, 4:9, 5:11, 1:2, and 3:5 orbital resonances with Jupiter.

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here is the link to the PDF because the Nature journal is being dumb for paywalling this press release: drive.google.com/file/d/1Tcjj...

drive.google.com

s41550-026-02846-1.pdf

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Not sure what you mean by "significant", but the authors say that a 100-meter-radius comet impactor could produce a nanobar-scale atmosphere that could last up to <100 years. I presume anything much bigger and disruptive (~100 km radius impactor) would end up vaporizing most volatiles more rapidly.

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Link to paper PDF without paywall here: drive.google.com/file/d/1Tcjj...

drive.google.com

s41550-026-02846-1.pdf

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here is the link to the PDF because the Nature journal is being dumb for paywalling this press release: drive.google.com/file/d/1Tcjj...

drive.google.com

s41550-026-02846-1.pdf

telescyote 🔭 @cosmicyote.bsky.social · 04/05/2026

Reposted by astrafoxen

Neat stuff! This was done by observing an occultation which is pretty cool. The team in Japan basically did the math to predict this ~500 km object, at 5 billion km ish from Earth, passing in front of a distant star for less than 30 seconds and watch it from several locations.

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VizieR database (astronomical catalogues and large surveys from CDS)

The occulted star is Gaia DR3 940732910252854272, which is apparent magnitude G=15.8 :) (and goddamn right, science paywalls are stupid, especially when the paper is announced in a press release.) vizier.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/Vizi...

vizier.cds.unistra.fr

VizieR

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Here's the earlier JWST study that found only water ice and traces of CO2 ice on 2002 XV93's dark gray surface. No detectable signs of volatiles (N2, CO, CH4), so whatever produced its atmosphere remains a mystery. Really weird for a supposedly dead-looking object. www.aanda.org/articles/aa/...

Near-infrared spectrum of the trans-Neptunian object 2002 XV93, measured by the James Webb Space Telescope. The spectrum plots 2002 XV93's relative reflectance (unitless values from 0 to 1 on the y-axis) over wavelength of light (x-axis, in units of micrometers/um). The spectrum shows 4 notable dips representing the absorption fingerprints of certain chemical compounds on its surface. The two broad, shallow dips at 1.5 and 2.0 um are labeled "water ice (H2O) in light blue text. The big central dip with a little peak at 3.1 um is labeled "crystalline H2O" in dark blue text. The very shallow and narrow dip at 4.25 um is labeled "CO2 ice" in purple text.

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