George's Random Astronomical Object
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© George Bendo copyright 2019-2023
Description
George's Random Astronomical Object is a biweekly astronomy podcast featuring science discussions about astronomical objects at randomly selected locations in the sky. The wide range of topics discussed in the show include stars, variable stars, variable variable stars, supermassive black holes, ultracool dwarf stars, exoplanets, howler monkeys, infrared radiation, acronyms, more acronyms, starbursts, measurements of less than 20 parsecs, jellyfish galaxies, diffuse ionized gas, and general overall weirdness.
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Abell 514 is a cluster of galaxies that contains six radio galaxies, and the polarized radio emission from those six radio galaxies can be used to probe the magnetic fields within the cluster.
Markarian 266 is a pair of merging galaxies that now contains two supermassive black holes.
Mu Columbae is a bright, blue star that was ejected from the Orion Nebula in a complex gravitational interaction involving three other stars.
WASP-1 was the first star identified as having an exoplanet by the Wide Angle Search for Planets and thus helped to validate the techniques used by that survey.
The cluster Abell 168 formed from the merger of two smaller clusters, and this had many weird effects on the intracluster gas between the galaxies.
WD 2211-495 is a small, hot white dwarf with a rather unusual amount of heavy elements in its outer atmosphere, implying that something from a surrounding planetary system occasionally falls into the star.
UGC 7321 is an unusually flat (or superthin) spiral galaxy, which is indicative of how it has avoided gravitational interactions with other galaxies that could alter its shape.
The elliptical galaxy contains an abnormal amount of interstellar dust with no accompanying interstellar gas, which is weird.
Antlia 2, which was recently found orbiting the Milky Way, is the most diffuse galaxy that anyone has ever discovered up to this point in time.
UKS 1 probably lies on the far side of the Milky Way, and the light from the cluster is heavily obscured by interstellar dust, but even though it's hard to see, astronomers are still really interested in it.
R Aquarii could be described as one of the closest symbiotic binary star systems to Earth, but it's more complicated than that.
NGC 6052 looks like a spiral galaxy smashing into a wall of stars, which is more or less what is actually happening.
Although at first NGC 6781 may look like a spherical planetary nebula, it actually has a cylindrical shape, which has rather complex scientific implications for analyzing this object.
The red dwarf HD 260655 has two large, hot, rocky planets orbiting very close to it.
As the largest open cluster that anyone has found in the Milky Way, Westerlund 1 contains a lot of rare and weird stars.
The evolved red star HD 214362 is orbiting the center of the Milky Way in a very eccentric way (as in either its orbit is a very elongated ellipse or its orbit is just plainly strange).
In 1970, the quasar 4C 05.34 was the most distant known object in the universe, but this is not the only interesting fact about this object.
A large mass of gas fell into the lenticular galaxy NGC 3593 about 2 billion years ago, and this gas both changed the appearance of the galaxy and also created new stars that now orbit the galaxy in the opposite direction from the older stars.
What may be most interesting about the pulsar PSR J2124-3358 is not that it is spinning very rapidly but that stellar winds from the pulsar have collided with the interstellar medium, producing a glowing bow shock.
The star WR 124 (also called Merrill's Star, although that name ignores two of the people involved in the discovery) is a really hot Wolf-Rayet star that has produced the surrounding nebula M1-67 (which has no relation to Messier 1) and that is hurling through the Milky Way in an unusual direction at an unusual speed.
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