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George's Random Astronomical Object

George's Random Astronomical Object

Author: George Bendo

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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 12 parsecs, jellyfish galaxies, diffuse ionized gas, and general overall weirdness.
142 Episodes
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The awkwardly-named Segue 2 is (as of the time of the publication of this episode) the smallest galaxy anyone has ever found.
Messier 74 is just a very nice looking face-on spiral galaxy, which has made it quite useful for many different types of astrophysical analyses.
Infrared observations of SN 1995N indicate that the material ejected by the explosion may have produced a huge amount of dust.
Object 139: Recoil

Object 139: Recoil

2024-12-0808:16

The galaxy 3C 186 features a supermassive black hole with a mass several billions of times the mass of the Sun that has been ejected 36000 light years out of the galaxy's nucleus.
4U 1850-087 is an ultracompact binary star system consisting of a whtie dwarf and a neutron star orbiting each other so closely that the neutron star can strip the outer layers off of the white dwarf.
The elliptical galaxy NGC 4291 contains a supermassive black hole that is unusually massive in comparison to the rest of the galaxy.
Object 136: Barium

Object 136: Barium

2024-10-2710:43

HD 11397 is one of very few Sun-like stars that might seem ordinary but actually contain abnormally large amounts of heavy elements, most notably barium, that they could not have formed themselves.
NGC 3801 is one of the very few nearby galaxies where astronomers can see jets from an active galactic nucleus disrupting star formation in the galaxy in a process known as feedback.
The star at the center of the planetary nebula NGC 7094 is almost but not quite a white dwarf, making it a rather unusual object for astronomers to look at.
One of the spiral arms in the galaxy NGC 3110 is producing unusually huge amounts of new stars as well as unusually huge amounts of infrared emission.
The radio source PMN J0134-0931 created a lot of excitement in 2002 when people discovered that it was a quasar gravitationally lensed by another galaxy in front of it, they were really excited.
Hydrus I is a very small, ultrafaint dwarf galaxy orbiting the Milky Way that was accidentally (or, to use the technical term, serendipitously) found by the Dark Energy Survey.
NGC 4261 was made famous when Hubble Space Telescope observations in the 1990s showed that this elliptical galaxy contains a supermassive black hole.
Object 129: Rinky-Dink

Object 129: Rinky-Dink

2024-07-2109:15

The very small Pyxis Cluster orbits the Milky Way in such an extremely extended orbit that it travels further away than many of the dwarf galaxies orbiting our galaxy.
The NGC 6221/NGC 6215 Group of galaxies contains a bridge-like structure of hydrogen gas connecting the two spiral galaxies within the group as well as a dwarf galaxy that looks like it formed within the bridge.
The open cluster NGC 188 is peculiar not only because it is very old for an open cluster but also because it contains an unusual number of blue stars for a cluster of its age.
HD 181433 has three exoplanets, two of which are gas giants with very unusually elongated orbits that have been very challenging to properly measure.
HR 1099 (also known as V711 Tauri) was instrumental in showing that magnetic fields play a major role in causing the variability of stars within the RS CVn class of variable star systems.
Object 124: 6 > 2

Object 124: 6 > 2

2024-05-1311:16

Most people would associate Castor with Pollux, which are the two brightest stars in the constellation Gemini, but Castor by itself is very interesting because it is actually a very complex system containing six stars.
The quasar QSO 1331+170 is best known for having a darker galaxy in front of it that is absorbing its light.
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