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Nora's Guide to the Galaxy @ngttg.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Year of Space Facts: Week 40/52 🔭🧪🛰 We all know the beauty of Saturn's rings, but all the giant planets have rings! And not just them: dwarf planets Haumea and Quaoar have rings, and even the asteroid Chariklo and comet Chiron are known to have rings! But no pretty pictures of those =( 📸 NASA

backlit rings of Jupiter during a Jovian solar eclipse

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Nora's Guide to the Galaxy @ngttg.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Year of Space Facts: Week 39/52 🔭🧪🛰 Thanks to gravity's inverse square law, it requires a lot more "delta-v" to reach orbits closer to the Sun than Earth than going to orbits farther out. That means Mercury, not Neptune, is actually the most difficult planet to travel to!

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Nora's Guide to the Galaxy @ngttg.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Year of Space Facts: Week 38/52 🔭🧪🛰 White dwarfs are the hot stellar remnants of most stars. They slowly cool over time and eventually become "black" dwarfs—or at least, so we think. The cooling is so slow that it can't have happened in only the 13.8 billion years the universe has been around!

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Nora's Guide to the Galaxy @ngttg.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Year of Space Facts: Week 37/52 🔭🧪🛰 The big galaxies (like ours!) get bigger by cannibalizing smaller galaxies. And they're messy eaters! Stellar streams, elongated trails of stars orbiting a galaxy, can be from current meals (eg Sagittarius stream) or crumbs from the past (eg Helmi stream). 📸 ESA

Sagittarius collisions trigger star formation in Milky Way

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Nora's Guide to the Galaxy @ngttg.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

I use Rebound to simulate the planetary orbits, and for the Hohmann transfers I just wrote up a simple implementation of the vis-viva equation (both in Python). For the brachistochrone calculations, I was happy to find this excellent nomogram that saved me quite a bit of effort!

projectrho.com

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Nora's Guide to the Galaxy @ngttg.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Of course, only the poors have to do something as slow as a Hohmann transfer, some people get to zip around on brachistochrone trajectories!

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Nora's Guide to the Galaxy @ngttg.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Me: Oh, I'm an astrophysicist, but I don't write hard sci-fi! Also me: *making a spreadsheet of all my planets' ephemerides at epoch so I can simulate Hohmann transfer times at the time of any scene*

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Nora's Guide to the Galaxy @ngttg.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

I found this confusing after my diagnosis, and I looked into it and found they're stage 0 cancer which can be considered "pre-cancer," but the cells are definitely cancerous, just not invasive. Medical terminology is a trip!

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Nora's Guide to the Galaxy @ngttg.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Having a squamous cell carcinoma in situ is so weird because like yeah it's *technically* cancer but it's not like cancer cancer

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Nora's Guide to the Galaxy @ngttg.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Year of Space Facts: Week 36/52 🔭🧪🛰 Birthday edition! 🎂 Planetary orbits are ellipses (h/t Kepler's First Law), and there actually is not an exact solution for the perimeter of an ellipse! But we can approximate, and Earth's orbit is close to circular: it travels about 1.9998624π AU in one year.

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Nora's Guide to the Galaxy @ngttg.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Year of Space Facts: Week 35/52 🔭🧪🛰 Earth is not the only place with lakes, although I wouldn't fancy a swim in the liquid methane and ethane lakes on Saturn's largest moon, Titan, where the surface temperature is a chilly -290 °F (-179 °C)! 📸 NASA/JPL-Caltech/USGS

A strip of radar data showing yellow land and blue lakes

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Nora's Guide to the Galaxy @ngttg.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

Excited for the Roman launch!! But 4 AM is not for me, so I look forward to seeing updates in the morning 🤞🚀

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Nora's Guide to the Galaxy @ngttg.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

This was such a good story! Can't believe I know such amazing writers 🫶

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Nora's Guide to the Galaxy @ngttg.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Earth and Jupiter have different densities, so their masses and volumes relative to the Sun aren't the same!

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Nora's Guide to the Galaxy @ngttg.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

It's possible I bit off more than I could chew in this one, trying to touch on the basics of habitability in 16 minutes! But hey I got to throw in a self citation 😏 youtu.be/oLwTB3oPz88 🧪🔭👩‍🔬

youtu.be

Life on Other Planets: What Does It Take?

YouTube video by Dr. Nora's Guide to the Galaxy

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Nora's Guide to the Galaxy @ngttg.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Year of Space Facts: Week 34/52 🔭🧪🛰 Magnetars have such insanely strong magnetic fields (up to 100 billion teslas, over 2 quadrillion times stronger than Earth's) that they can deform atoms into long cylinders, which would actually kill you. LETHALLY STRONG magnetic fields! 📸 NASA/CXC

A magnetar labeled on a picture of stars, gas, dust, and distant galaxies

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Nora's Guide to the Galaxy @ngttg.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Pluto was not demoted. It was reclassified. Still complaining about Pluto (and only Pluto) being a dwarf planet is science denialism. Gah clearly I'm going to have to stay off the internet today because I do not have the patience for this shit.

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Nora's Guide to the Galaxy @ngttg.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

Year of Space Facts: Week 33/52 🔭🧪🛰 Space is almost, but not quite, a perfect vacuum. Between stars, the ISM ranges between a million to less than one particle per cubic cm, and between galaxies, the IGM can be less than 1 particle per cubic m! Standard air is about 25 quintillion per cubic cm.

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Nora's Guide to the Galaxy @ngttg.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

Year of Space Facts: Week 32/52 🔭🧪🛰 Mercury gets up to 800°F, but it isn't the hottest planet. Thanks to its very thick, very CO2 atmosphere, Venus can reach almost 900°F! And in exoplanet systems, the rocky exoplanet 55 Cancri e reaches >6300°F, and the gas giant KELT-9 b can get up to ~8000°F!

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Nora's Guide to the Galaxy @ngttg.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

Similar objects perhaps but I highly doubt they would be actually trees!

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Nora's Guide to the Galaxy @ngttg.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

Year of Space Facts: Week 31/52 🔭🧪🛰 The solar system object that has been observed at the farthest distance: 2018 AG37, aka Farfarout, observed at 132.6 AU. The solar system object with a well-constrained orbit that will get to the farthest distance: 2014 FE72, with an aphelion of about 5338 AU!

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Nora's Guide to the Galaxy @ngttg.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

I was really crunched for time the last 2 weeks, so I didn't get to do as much editing on my space fact videos. So this week I enjoyed getting back to "full effort"—except for the fact that it took 3 hours for the 90 second video 😭

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Nora's Guide to the Galaxy @ngttg.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

I love when I'm making graphics for something and realize that even though I knew the numbers going in, I completely underestimated them. Had to shift the bodies into "lollipops" to make them fit in this one!!

A rectangle broken into 2 parts with 3 lines branching off connected to illustrations of icy bodies and the sun. The left half is ~40x longer than the right half.

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Nora's Guide to the Galaxy @ngttg.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

Year of Space Facts: Week 30/52 🔭🧪🛰 There about 30 trees on Earth for every star in the Milky Way! But in the entire universe, there are about 10 million stars for every tree. Every galaxy has stars, but trees are unique to Earth! Wood is one of the rarest materials, cosmically speaking. 🌲

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Nora's Guide to the Galaxy @ngttg.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

Year of Space Facts: Week 29/52 🔭🧪🛰 A lot remains to be discovered about free-floating planets and the formation and evolution of planetary systems, but we do know stars lose a lot of their original planets—maybe even more than they keep! Maybe our own solar system even once had more ice giants.

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Nora's Guide to the Galaxy @ngttg.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

Year of Space Facts: Week 28/52 🔭🧪🛰️ Basically all galaxies host a SMBH at their heart—a supermassive black hole, like the Milky Way's Sag A* (4M solar masses). Or even an ultramassive black hole, like LRG 3-757 (36B M☉). Or maybe even a stupendously large black hole, like Phoenix A (100B M☉?!?).

A fuzzy red galaxy surrounded by a blue ring that is not quite closed (Cosmic Horseshoe, NASA/ESA)

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Reposted by Nora's Guide to the Galaxy

ESA Space Science @science.esa.int · 06/07/2026

Written in its stars ✨ On its 4th science anniversary, Webb has turned its gaze towards Centaurus A. Thanks to its high resolution we can now study the galaxy star by star, reconstructing when different events in its history happened 👉 www.esa.int/Science_Expl... 🔭 🧪

$A horizontal image of the galaxy Centaurus A stretches across a black background filled with thousands of tiny purple, pink, and white points of light. The galaxy is brightest at its centre, where a brilliant white and pale pink glow radiates outward. Eight diffraction spikes extend from the central glow. Delicate loops and wispy ribbons of pink and lavender arc above and below the centre of the image in the shape of an ‘S’. A band of gray and white dust in the shape of a parallelogram cuts across the middle of the galaxy. Mottled patches and bright knots are scattered throughout the dusty band. The galaxy’s outer edges fade into soft, cloud-like plumes with feathery textures that stretch toward the left and right sides of the image. Against the surrounding darkness, a few bright foreground stars shine with Webb’s distinctive diffraction spikes, while countless fainter stars create a speckled backdrop. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI. Image Processing: A. Pagan (STScI), J. Depasquale (STScI), M. Garcia Marin (ESA Office at STScI)$

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Nora's Guide to the Galaxy @ngttg.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

Telescopes and cameras don't have the same problem with cones, and the colors really pop in images!! 📸 TheStarmon (Wikimedia Commons)

A starry sky with the constellation Orion shown

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Nora's Guide to the Galaxy @ngttg.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

Year of Space Facts: Week 27/52 🔭🧪🛰️ Most stars look white by eye. Dim light doesn't activate the color vision cells (cones) in our eyes, so only very bright stars can appear colored. Their color comes from their temps; cooler stars are redder (like Betelgeuse), hotter stars are bluer (like Rigel).

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Nora's Guide to the Galaxy @ngttg.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

It was extremely cute! And I received word that the beavers now have a zipline!

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Nora's Guide to the Galaxy @ngttg.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

My husband is a gamer and he plays a wide variety of games, so I love that I never know what to expect when he tells me about them. Today it was a certainly a surprise when he said "Let me show you this city I built. First of all: it's beavers."

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Nora's Guide to the Galaxy @ngttg.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

Halfway through 2026 😳 Some writing stats for me so far this year: 6 new short stories written 64 short story submissions 53 short story rejections (2 after being held!) 25 queries sent 16 queries rejected 5377 words written in a new novel

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Nora's Guide to the Galaxy @ngttg.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

Halfway (!) through a Year of Space Facts: Week 26/52 🔭🧪🛰️ Photons can travel a long way before they reach your eye. Most observers can see Deneb in Cygnus, 2600 light-years away. Lucky observers might see the star HD 58439 in Canis Major, about 10,000 light-years away!

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Nora's Guide to the Galaxy @ngttg.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

Year of Space Facts: Week 25/52 🔭🧪🛰️ The biggest moon, absolutely, is Ganymede (0.025 M🜨/0.413 R🜨). The biggest moon, relatively, is Charon (12.2% Mhost). But if you count Pluto-Charon as a binary dwarf planet, then the biggest moon, relatively, is the Moon (1.2% Mhost)! 📸NASA/JPL/JSC

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Nora's Guide to the Galaxy @ngttg.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

Happy Summer Solstice! The bittersweet day where I'm torn between being sad about shorter days to come and being happy about warmer days to come!

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Nora's Guide to the Galaxy @ngttg.bsky.social · 21/06/2026

No matter how much nonwork work I get done on the weekends, it's never enough 😩

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Nora's Guide to the Galaxy @ngttg.bsky.social · 20/06/2026

Haha I noticed him during the last game and said the same thing! This game I was also struck by how shiny his hair is, I want this man's hair routine!

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Nora's Guide to the Galaxy @ngttg.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

Vegemite is actually pretty good ...

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Nora's Guide to the Galaxy @ngttg.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

This is also why we only play coop games together 😅

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Nora's Guide to the Galaxy @ngttg.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

Watching USA-AUS in our 🇺🇸🇦🇺 household and kinda hoping for a draw tbh because I can never be properly happy over a win if my husband loses

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Nora's Guide to the Galaxy @ngttg.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

TFW you're done with your talk by 10:10 on day 1 💅

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Nora's Guide to the Galaxy @ngttg.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

Year of Space Facts: Week 24/52 🔭🧪🛰️ 60-70 billion neutrinos pass through a single square centimeter on Earth every second! The vast majority are from nuclear fusion in the core of the Sun—day or night, because neutrinos barely interact with matter, so they easily pass through the whole planet.

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Nora's Guide to the Galaxy @ngttg.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

IG is absolutely playing with me, why the hell would I be saying "nutrinos" when NEUTRINOS is an actual fucking word 🤦‍♀️

Screenshot from reels editor showing auto generated captions repeatedly using the word "nutrinos"

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