Y’all probably already know I am no fan of RFK Jr. The kindest thing I can say about him is he’s a crackpot, but that hardly conveys the very, very serious danger he is to public health. He is anti-vaccine, even anti-science, and promotes a massive amount of quackery. A lot of people think he’s a eugenicist, and I’ll admit it’s hard to argue against that. I myself have compared him to Trofim Lysenko, a man who helped cause millions of deaths in the Soviet Union due to his quackery.

The good folks at Stand Up For Science have a public petition to get him impeached. Obviously, I strongly support this, and wrote about it in a recent newsletter.

Some good news I’ve seen in the past few days is that some politicians are agreeing. U. S. Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) has called for his impeachment. Bernie Sanders has said RFK JR. should resign (which would be nice in a just world, but RFK is a megalomaniac cut in the same cloth as Trump, and will never resign). Nine (!) former CDC directors published an OpEd in the New York Times that stops short of saying he should be impeached, but still write a dire warning about what will happen if he is left in office. 

On Bluesky, I said that Trump picking RFK Jr. to run the HHS was perhaps the single most dangerous things he’s done. I stand by that. Literally, millions could suffer and die due to what he’s doing and wants to do.

So please, take some action. Sign the SUFS petition, and call your Representative. 5Calls.org can help you here, as can Indivisible, which have guides on how to do it and what to say. If you’ve called in the past, great! Thank you! But please do it again.

I’ve been beating this drum for a long time now, and clearly I will have to continue to do so. Nothing will change unless we change it.

At the very center of our Milky Way galaxy is a supermassive black hole called Sgr A* (“Sagittarius A-star”). It has a mass of about four million times that of the sun, and is fairly quiet; it’s not eating a lot of material at the moment.

Surrounding it is a cluster of stars called the Sgr-A* cluster or sometimes the S-cluster. It’s not clear how many stars are in it — we’re looking through scads of dust to see them, and the galactic center is 26,000 light-years away — but it’s likely hundreds within about a tenth of a light year of the black hole, surrounded by an even bigger cluster of stars. The brightest stars are the ones we see the most easily, and they look young, perhaps only a few million years old.

It’s not clear how these stars formed so close to the black hole. Perhaps they formed father out and migrated inwards, or some weird situation is going on that allows stars to form in situ.

Weirdly, the orbits of the stars are at all different orientations. If they formed from material around the black hole, it would be more likely their orbits would be aligned. If they did form there, what could have scattered their orbits?

A new paper just published provides a possible explanation: a smaller black hole could have merged with Sgr A*, messing up the orbits [link to journal paper]. The team ran computer simulations of what would happen if a second black hole stuck its nose into the galactic center. They wanted to see if the stellar orbits were affected, and if it could happen in the right time frame (less than a few million years, since that’s the age of the stars).

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