Will GaterVerified account

@willgater

Astronomer, science journalist, space geek & astrophotographer.

UK
willgater.com
Joined May 2008
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  1. Pinned Tweet
    3 Sep 2020

    Today's the day! The Mysteries of the Universe is out in bookshops now! 🥳🥳🥳 If your little ones are curious about the Solar System and the stars & galaxies beyond, they'll find loads to explore in the stories and beautiful illustrations in this book.

    , , and
    14 replies 42 retweets 133 likes
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  2. 11 hours ago

    Only going to watch this if the first 30 mins are DiCaprio & Lawrence arguing with other astronomers* about arc lengths. *via arXiv of course h/t

    2:32
    Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Rob Morgan, Jonah Hill, Mark Rylance, Tyler Perry, Timothée Chalamet, Ron Perlman, Ariana Grande, Scott Mescudi, Cate Blanchett, and Meryl Streep star in the end all be all movie event of the year. Don’t Look Up premieres December 24.
    4 replies 13 likes
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  3. Retweeted
    Nov 15

    The US State Department says Russia today “recklessly conducted a destructive anti-satellite test” against one of its own satellites, generating more than 1,500 pieces of trackable orbital debris, and hundreds of thousands of smaller fragments in orbit.

    13 replies 112 retweets 255 likes
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  4. Retweeted
    Nov 15

    With LeoLabs confirming debris "near" Kosmos-1408 and CNN quoting US officials that there was an ASAT test, rumours are solidfiying into a consistent story that indeed a Russian antisatellite test on Nov 13 or 14 hit Kosmos-1408 causing a debris cloud intersecting the ISS orbit

    39 replies 339 retweets 1,244 likes
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  5. Retweeted
    Nov 13
    Replying to

    Nearly matches the results of the previous occultation by 2002 TC302 in 2018 reported here:

    1 reply 1 retweet 1 like
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  6. Nov 13

    On Thursday an icy world beyond Neptune (6.4 billion km from 🌍) drifted in front of a background star causing its light to blip out. By watching the ✨ disappear & reappear, astronomers have now been able to glean details of the object’s shape & size! Occultation science FTW!

    Preliminary profile of TNO (84522) 2002 TC302 recorded during the stellar occultation on 2021 Nov 11. TNO measurement: 525.9 km +/- 3.7 x 463.4 km +/- 4.5 Thanks to E. Frappa, & J. Moore, IOTA.
    2 replies 1 retweet 13 likes
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  7. Nov 12

    At the heart of that fuzzy dot is this. A place of towering, icy cliffs, boulder-strewn crags and (when the sun warms its surface) jets of gas and dust bursting out from cavernous pits.

    2 retweets 16 likes
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  8. Nov 12

    This is a stack of thirty 8-second exposures taken at ISO 1600 (through moonlight and light pollution – hence the sky gradient) from my back garden tonight.

    1 retweet 7 likes
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  9. Nov 12

    See the fuzzy spot of light with a tail in the centre of this pic? That's Comet Churyumov–Gerasimenko aka , the icy world that visited and now rests on. It's currently 63 million km away and is heading back out towards the orbit of Jupiter.

    4 replies 11 retweets 103 likes
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  10. Retweeted
    Nov 12

    Join us next Wednesday for a update!

    , and
    1 reply 9 retweets 26 likes
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  11. Nov 12

    Richard Bizley (who has an incredible gallery in Lyme Regis) has painted some wonderful depictions of what the crinoids might have looked like in a Jurassic sea (bottom of the pic sticking up out of seabed):

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  12. Nov 12

    For here’s a tiny pyritised ammonite & a small piece of crinoid stem that I found at Charmouth recently (close-ups from a USB microscope). Both date to the Jurassic period, which means they’re about 200 million years old.

    4 replies 3 retweets 19 likes
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  13. Nov 12

    Neat study just out from teams using the Large Binocular Telescope & the Lowell Discovery Telescope in the US. The near-Earth asteroid (469219) Kamoʻoalewa *might* be a 50-metre-wide chunk of the Moon chipped off by an ancient impact.

    1 like
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  14. Nov 11

    A dust trail from the comet may also sweep over the planet Venus next month. I wrote about that, and what astronomers might be able to learn from such an event, in this story from August. Also thread about it here:

    A comet that's currently swinging into the inner Solar System might sweep Venus with a trail of dust left in its wake this December. Here's my latest piece for on a fascinating new study by , (& others). Short 🧵 to follow.
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  15. Nov 11

    This comet is currently dropping into the inner Solar System ahead of its closest approach to🌍 in December. It's early days yet to gauge how impressive it might be in our night skies around that time, but from the pics below it's clear it's already showing interesting activity.

    At comet Leonard, the development looks very good. A deep image in blue-green shows a 17' coma and two tails: 25' typ 2 and 1.3 ° typ 1, image from November 11 UT 3.00 7x4min blue and 7x4min green with 11 "RASA and QHY600 Michael Jäger
    3 replies 9 retweets 43 likes
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  16. Nov 11

    And here's a lossless PNG of that shot on my astrophoto site, as Twitter's JPEG compression has not been kind to the fine details:

    1 retweet 2 likes
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  17. Nov 11

    Skies cleared here earlier to reveal a perfect first-quarter Moon draped in wisps of sunset-pink cloud. Here's an image from a few moments ago grabbed with a Canon 6D and 90mm Maksutov-Cassegrain telescope.

    1 reply 3 retweets 25 likes
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  18. Nov 11

    All I can think about when I see incredible deep sea videos like this is *god I hope I live long enough to see ROVs at Enceladus & Europa*. h/t

    1:34
    went back and captured video of the bigfin squid sighting - what an experience!! such great footage of an amazing animal 🤩
    4 replies 5 retweets 32 likes
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  19. Retweeted
    Nov 10

    Where are the ~4000 exoplanets we discovered ? Although some technics can see close to the galactic centre, we have explored only our close neighbourhood, a tiny part of the galaxy ! (Updated up to 2021).

    18 replies 333 retweets 1,039 likes
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  20. Nov 9

    This to me seems to be a key line in the paper: "The detections are not of high quality, do not show a strong correlation with a point-source profile, and therefore allow a suspicion of being extended and thus cirrus." 'Cirrus' here means wispy dust clouds within the Milky Way.

    1 reply 1 retweet 5 likes
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  21. Nov 9

    New paper on arXiv this morning claims there's a candidate sitting in infrared survey data from the 80s: As the study notes, whatever this is it's nowhere near where 's latest work suggests P9 should be. See:

    The candidate is on an orbit utterly inconsistent with our predictions for Planet Nine, and would not be capable of gravitationally perturbing the distant solar system in the ways that we have suggested. But, of course, that doesn't mean it isn't real!
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    1 reply 4 retweets 11 likes
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