BAN #103: Like me!, Watch me, Read my rant

Subscribers get to see me rant even more.

About this newsletter

In which I grovel for attention

Hey! You! Yes, you, who is reading this right now. I have a very quick favor to ask, so quick that actually doing it will take less time than it takes you to read me asking you this favor.

At the top of this post, right under the title, there is a series of icons. See ‘em there? If you liked this post, please click the little heart thingy. That helps me rise in the newsletter ranks at Substack, and that in turn helps more people find my newsletter.

Also, if you think this article is something others will like to, then please share it! I have no problems whatsoever with you sending the free newsletter to other people via whatever other-people-sharing technique you want, including taking a picture of it on your phone, printing it, and sending it to your luddite relative who thinks the Internet is for commies or something.

The same is true for the subscription-only Thursday issues, too, though I do ask you use your discretion and not just send the whole thing willy-nilly to the world. Duh. But letting others know about the BAN means more folks learn about astronomy and what’s going on in space, and that’s a good thing.

Thanks!

Upcoming Appearances/Shameless Self-Promotion

Where I’ll be doing things you can watch and listen to or read about

Set your VCR! Or, if you’re living in the 21st century your DVR: On Tuesday night there’s a new episode of “Space’s Deepest Secrets” on The Science Channel, and you may see my face with words coming out of it. The episode is “Hunt for the Missing Moons” and it’s about the hunt for exoplanets with moons and rings and such. Check your local listings etc. usw.

Oh and hey on March 8 I gave a talk at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder called “Strange New Worlds”, about the discovery of exoplanets and what they teach us about our own home planet. I love giving this talk, and I had a lot of fun at NIST as well. They graciously put it up on YouTube, too:

If you work at a museum or University or are the CEO of some giant corporation you’ll be pleased to know I will be happy to come to your establishment and give this (or one of many other talks) and all you have to do is give me some negotiated-upon amount of filthy lucre for it. My agent will be happy to talk to you; here’s my page on her site that has all the info you need.

Blog Jam

What I’ve recently written on the blog, ICYMI

[Artwork depicting a planet forming in a disk around a young star. In Thursday’s post I wrote about how ridiculously fast this is happening with one nearby baby planet. Credit: NOAJ]

Monday April 1, 2019: Four different - and spectacular - views into a stellar nursery

Tuesday April 2, 2019: Steampunk rocket: Engineers design a steam-powered asteroid spacecraft

Wednesday April 3, 2019: Astronomers spot a massive doughnut of material around quasar Cygnus A’s supermassive black hole

Thursday April 4, 2019: Wait. *HOW* fast do giant planets form?

Friday April 5, 2019: Yo dawg, I heard you like craters, so I found a crater in a crater

Space news

Space is big. That’s why we call it “space”

Speaking of blog posts…

In case you don’t follow me on Twitter (or you missed it in between horse photos), I went into a tweetstorm about Thursday’s blog post on how fast a nearby exoplanet is forming. I wanted to bring the numbers into the realm of something graspable and wound up terrifying myself. It didn’t help that I did the tweeting on the fly, doing the math for each step and then tweeting, so the numbers were fresh in my head.

Here’s the thread, for your amusement and/or brain-crushing realization that space is scary.

Et alia

You can email me at [email protected] (though replies can take a while), and all my social media outlets are gathered together at about.me. Also, if you don’t already, please subscribe to this newsletter! And feel free to tell a friend or nine, too. Thanks!