This is BAN issue #818, and that’s a kinda fun number: when written using ASCII characters (so the 1 doesn’t have the little curved serif arc thingy at the top) then it’s strobogrammatic, meaning it appears the same when rotated 180°. It’s also symmetric upon reflection; if you look at it in a mirror it still reads 818.

This has no deeper meaning, which is kinda like today, the day after Christmas and the start of the weird timeless week before New Year’s Day.

In that spirit, instead of my usual medium or deep-dive articles into topic astronomical, here instead for your enjoyment is a collection of shorter news items I’ve been collecting for a while. I like to have these handy in case I need a few hundred more words for an issue, but that’s hardly been a problem lately. I sometimes wish I were paid by the word.

So anyway, here’s News Roundup issue for you to read all at once or for you to break off a piece when you need it today. Enjoy.

•  There is a cluster of stars orbiting around Sgr A*, the supermassive black hole in the center of our Milky Way galaxy. Called the S-cluster, it consists of massive stars that may have formed in situ from gas near the black hole. Theoretical models suggest a lot of the clusters stars should be binary (two stars revolving around one another), but until now has been found. However, astronomers have announced they discovered one. Called D9, it looks like a star about 2.8 times the mass of the Sun orbited by another at 0.73 solar masses. They take about a year to orbit each other, separated by about 230 million km (together they take 44 years to orbit Sgr A*). The stars are young, likely 2.7 million years old — which is interesting, because gravitational interaction with material around the black hole should destabilize the binary and cause the two stars to merge in a process that takes on the order of a million years, so they may be close to merging now. Most of the stars in the cluster are predicted to be just pre-merger, or have merged long ago [link to journal paper].

• Want to help astronomers classify galaxies? There’s a new project at Zooniverse which allows you look through images from the ESA mission Euclid and ID the galaxies seen. I just played with it and its pretty easy. There’s a short intro you can read to understand what they’re looking for and how to proceed, and then you can jump right in! An image of a galaxy or galaxies is presented to you, with options to choose about it’s shape, structure, and more. The images are not like Hubble, with huge sharp features, so sometimes you have to guess a little, but that’s OK: what the astronomers in charge of this project have found is that when you have enough people looking at the images, a consensus is generally reached that’s pretty accurate. And mind you, this is real science. You’re helping astronomers classify and build up a database of these galaxies, which is important work. So have at it!

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