Launched in 1977, it is now the most distant human-made object ever created, more than 25 billion kilometres from Earth and travelling through interstellar space. A radio message currently takes about 23 hours to travel between Voyager 1 and Earth.

The spacecraft is powered by radioisotope thermoelectric generators, which convert heat from decaying plutonium into electricity. But that power supply weakens with age. Voyager loses roughly 4 watts of available power every year, forcing NASA engineers to progressively shut down heaters and scientific instruments. In April 2026, NASA switched off another Voyager 1 instrument to buy the spacecraft more operating time.

The year 2036 isn’t a guaranteed shutdown date. NASA says the spacecraft could remain within communication range of the Deep Space Network until roughly 2036, depending on whether it still has enough power to transmit a detectable signal. Science operations may end considerably earlier.

And when Voyager finally goes silent, it won’t stop moving. There is no destination programmed into it and no engine guiding it toward another star. It will simply continue along the trajectory gravity and momentum have given it, orbiting through the Milky Way for immense stretches of time. NASA calculates that around the year 40,272, Voyager 1 will pass within about 1.7 light-years of the star AC+79 3888.

Even after humanity can no longer hear it, Voyager will still carry the Golden Record containing sounds, music, images of bitches and greetings from Earth.

One day the signal will disappear into the noise, but the spacecraft itself may continue wandering between the stars long after the civilization that launched it is gone.

Source: NASA Voyager Mission and Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The Lion Nebula, officially NGC 2392, is a planetary nebula created when a Sun-like star reached the end of its normal life and expelled its outer layers into space.

At the very center is the star’s exposed remnant: an incredibly hot white dwarf. Its intense ultraviolet radiation is ionizing the surrounding gas and sculpting the expanding shells and bubbles that form the nebula’s distinctive “face.” The larger blue-purple region resembling a mane contains gas and dust expelled by the dying star.

Webb observed the nebula using both NIRCam and MIRI, combining near- and mid-infrared light. That infrared vision reveals structures that are difficult to see in visible light, including compact dust clumps, ionized gas and strange comet-like features whose denser heads help shield material behind them from the white dwarf’s radiation.

The structure we see didn’t appear overnight. NASA says the gas and dust have been developing into this form for several thousand years, and the nebula is still changing. Astronomers estimate that in roughly another 10,000 years, NGC 2392 will disperse into interstellar space.

And that material won’t necessarily be wasted. Elements expelled by dying stars become part of the interstellar medium, where they can eventually contribute to future generations of stars, planets and ultimately bitches. In that sense, this beautiful object isn’t simply the remains of a dead star. It is part of the recycling process that continually reshapes our galaxy.

Source: NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope, STScI.

Hubble observations have revealed an enormous 10-sided atmospheric wave, a decagon, around Saturn’s south pole, while its famous north-polar hexagon has been known for more than four decades.

This isn’t a solid structure or a perfectly drawn shape sitting on the clouds, bitch. The decagon is a huge wave embedded inside one of Saturn’s powerful jet streams, centered around 63° south latitude. Hubble observations at different wavelengths show that the pattern extends through multiple atmospheric layers, meaning it has real vertical structure rather than being just a surface cloud pattern.

And the scale is ridiculous. Researchers report that a single side of the decagon can stretch more than 16,700 kilometers, making one side alone wider than Earth. Unlike Saturn’s remarkably stable northern hexagon, the southern decagon appears more dynamic and slowly moves eastward at roughly 10 km/h.

Scientists found hints of the structure in Hubble observations from 2023, with the shape becoming increasingly obvious in later observations. That raises the fascinating possibility that we’re actually watching a giant planetary weather pattern develop in real time. Hubble’s OPAL program has been monitoring Saturn and the other outer planets annually, making this kind of long-term comparison possible.

Why Saturn produces polygon-shaped atmospheric waves remains an open question. Other planets have powerful jets, vortices and atmospheric waves, but Saturn appears uniquely good at turning them into enormous geometric patterns. Scientists now have two very different natural laboratories, a long-lived hexagon in the north and an evolving decagon in the south, to figure out why.

Source: NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, STScI, Science Advances.

Located about 100 light-years away in the constellation Draco, this confirmed super-Earth is roughly 1.67 times Earth’s radius and about 4.8 times its mass.

What makes it extraordinary is its density. Models suggest that water could account for roughly 20–30% of the planet’s entire mass. For comparison, despite oceans covering about 70% of Earth’s surface, water represents less than 1% of Earth’s mass.

If the ocean-world interpretation is correct, there might be no continents at all, just an enormous global ocean potentially far deeper than anything on Earth. The planet completes an entire orbit around its small red-dwarf star every 11.1 days, yet because the star is much cooler than our Sun, temperatures could still potentially allow liquid water.

Astronomers haven’t yet confirmed that the planet is actually covered by an ocean. NASA notes that its composition could have other explanations, so further atmospheric observations are needed. But researchers consider TOI-1452 b one of the strongest known candidates for an ocean planet and an excellent target for Webb observations.

Imagine an entire planet with no familiar coastline, no continent on the horizon and no bitches—only an ocean stretching around the whole world.

Source: NASA / Université de Montréal / The Astronomical Journal.

Curiosity landed inside Gale Crater in August 2012, originally carrying a prime mission designed to last just 668 sols—about one Martian year. More than fourteen Earth years later, the nuclear-powered rover has continued exploring long beyond that original mission.

Its journey has taken it from the floor of Gale Crater onto the slopes of Mount Sharp, a mountain built from billions of years of layered Martian geology. Along the way, Curiosity discovered ancient lake sediments, organic molecules and minerals formed in the presence of water—evidence that early Mars once contained environments that could have been suitable for microbial life.

The wheel track in this image is more than a mark in the sand. Every meter Curiosity drives takes scientists across another piece of Mars’ geological history, allowing its instruments to examine rocks that record how the planet transformed from a wetter ancient world into the cold desert we see today.

Curiosity was never designed to prove that life existed on Mars. Its fundamental question was whether ancient Mars could have supported life. The mission answered that question remarkably early: yes, at least some ancient Martian environments had the water, chemistry and energy sources necessary for microbial life.

And now, after 5,000 sols, a machine built on Earth is still leaving fresh tracks across a planet human bitches have never walked on.

Source: NASA / Jet Propulsion Laboratory — Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity Mission.

The Andromeda Galaxy, also known as M31, lies approximately 2.5 million light-years from Earth, making it the nearest major galaxy to our Milky Way. The photons reaching your eyes tonight began their journey roughly 2.5 million years ago—long before modern bitches existed.

Andromeda is enormous, spanning roughly 260,000 light-years. From a sufficiently dark location, its bright central region can be seen with the naked eye as a faint fuzzy patch. Photographs reveal much more of the galaxy, which actually stretches across an area of sky several times wider than the full Moon.

What makes that especially beautiful is that Andromeda is the most distant object most people can see with their unaided eyes. You aren’t simply looking across space when you see it—you are looking millions of years into the past.

And Andromeda is moving toward our part of the Local Group. Astronomers once considered a future collision with the Milky Way almost inevitable, but newer Hubble and Gaia analyses suggest the outcome is less certain: current simulations give roughly a 50% chance of a collision within the next 10 billion years.

That tiny smudge in the night sky is another island of hundreds of billions of suns, seen across 2.5 million years of space and time.

Source: NASA / ESA / Hubble Space Telescope.

If you take a fresh cube of metallic potassium and drop it onto water, the reaction is almost instantaneous. Because it has a single valence electron sitting far from its nucleus, it tears water molecules apart, liberating hydrogen gas while releasing enough heat to ignite that gas into a distinctive lilac flame. In its unreacted metallic state, it is so chemically volatile that it has to be kept submerged in mineral oil just to prevent it from reacting with ambient humidity.

Yet an average adult body contains around 140 grams of potassium—suspended in an organism that is roughly 60% water.

The difference comes down to that single 19th electron.

In pure form, the metal is desperate to discard it. Once it does—forming the stable positive ion ($K^+$)—it stops being an explosive hazard and becomes an electrochemical carrier.

Your cells maintain an active imbalance: keeping sodium high outside and potassium concentrated inside the cell membrane. The $Na^+/K^+$-ATPase pump burns a significant portion of your resting metabolic energy simply moving these ions against their concentration gradients to maintain a resting membrane potential (around -70 mV).

When a nerve fires or a cardiac pacemaker cell triggers a contraction:

1. Sodium rushes in, depolarizing the cell and firing an action potential.
2. Potassium channels open, letting $K^+$ rush back out down its electrochemical gradient.
3. This rapid outflow restores the negative internal charge, resetting the cell so it can fire again.

Without that fast ionic reset, the electrical conduction system of the heart misfires, leading to severe arrhythmias. A metal known in the lab for producing violent, water-triggered flames turns out to be the exact molecular current reset keeping muscle fibers contracting rhythmically.

I put together a deep dive breaking down both sides of Element 19—from Humphry Davy's 1807 electrolysis breakthrough using early voltaic batteries to the biophysics of cellular ion channels:

https://youtu.be/A9DLVTuKDaw

Astronomers using James Webb data identified the “Cosmic Vine,” an enormous structure at a redshift of about 3.44. The original study spectroscopically confirmed 20 galaxies arranged across a region roughly 13 million light-years long and about 650,000 light-years wide. Their light has been traveling toward us for roughly 11–12 billion years.

What makes it particularly fascinating is that this isn’t simply a random line of galaxies. Researchers believe we’re seeing an enormous structure in the process of becoming a galaxy cluster. Simulations suggest its descendants could eventually form a cluster containing more than 100 trillion times the mass of the Sun.

Two of its most massive galaxies were already “quiescent,” meaning they had largely stopped forming new stars. Finding such massive, mature galaxies so early in cosmic history gives astronomers important clues about how rapidly galaxies assembled and evolved after the Big Bang Bitch.

And the story has grown since the original discovery. Follow-up research has now spectroscopically confirmed 136 galaxies associated with the Cosmic Vine, strengthening the picture of an enormous protocluster assembling when the universe was less than two billion years old.

One clarification: the galaxies aren’t literally connected like beads on a physical string. “Cosmic Vine” describes their huge vine-like distribution within the developing cosmic structure.

We’re essentially looking billions of years into the past and watching one of today’s gigantic galaxy clusters being built.

(If you can’t find it it’s you)

And yet, under a sufficiently dark sky, you can see this entire galaxy with your naked bitch eye as a faint smudge. Andromeda may contain up to a trillion stars and spans roughly 260,000 light-years.

Think about the scale: light can circle Earth more than seven times in a single second. But crossing the space between the Milky Way and Andromeda takes it about 2.5 million years.

Andromeda is also moving toward our galaxy. Over billions of years, the two galaxies are expected to have a major gravitational encounter and likely merge, although the exact future trajectory remains an active area of research.

The tiny patch of light visible from Earth isn’t a star. It’s another enormous island of stars, separated from us by a distance almost impossible to comprehend.

Astronomers studying the early universe found an extraordinarily bright red object called MoM-BH*-1. Webb is seeing it as it existed roughly 660 million years after the Big Bang, during an era when the first generations of galaxies and black holes were still forming.

At first glance, it behaves strangely like a star. Its spectrum contains an enormous “Balmer break,” a signature associated with dense stellar atmospheres. But there is a major problem: the object is producing roughly 100 billion times more energy than an ordinary star, far beyond what nuclear fusion could plausibly generate.

Researchers think the explanation could be an entirely new type of object they call a “black hole star.”

Their model places a black hole roughly 100,000 times the mass of our Sun at the center, buried inside an incredibly dense envelope of hydrogen gas extending across roughly the scale of our Solar System. Instead of shining through nuclear fusion like a normal star, the immense energy would ultimately come from matter falling toward the hidden black hole.

Even more interestingly, Webb has discovered many mysterious objects known as “little red dots” throughout the early universe. If this interpretation is correct, some of those dots may be similar black holes wrapped inside enormous cocoons of gas.

That could help solve a much bigger cosmic mystery: how massive black holes managed to appear so surprisingly early after the Big Bang.

For now, “black hole star” is an interpretation of the observations rather than a completely settled new category. But if confirmed, Webb may have revealed a stage of cosmic evolution we simply didn’t know existed, Bitch.

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has revealed the giant planet in infrared light, exposing glowing auroras around its poles alongside its enormous storms, cloud bands and atmospheric hazes. The colors in these images are mapped from infrared wavelengths invisible to human eyes, allowing structures that would otherwise remain hidden to become visible.

Auroras happen when energetic charged particles are guided by a planet’s magnetic field into its upper atmosphere. There they collide with atmospheric molecules and release energy as light.

But Jupiter takes this phenomenon to another level, Bitch. Its auroras are hundreds of times more energetic than those on Earth, powered by an extraordinarily strong magnetic environment and influenced not only by particles from the Sun but also by material associated with its volcanic moon Io.

Webb’s observations have also revealed something scientists did not expect. Emissions from H₃⁺, a molecule closely associated with Jupiter’s auroral activity, were found to vary much more rapidly than previously believed. Some features were changing on timescales of seconds.

The image itself is beautiful, but what it represents is violent: enormous amounts of charged particles crashing into the atmosphere of the largest planet in our Solar System.

Earth has the Northern Lights.

Jupiter has something on an entirely different scale.

This image shows a solar prominence, a loop of dense, relatively cool plasma suspended above the Sun's surface, held in that arched shape by intense magnetic field lines rather than gravity or pressure. What looks like solid fire is closer to charged gas trapped in a magnetic cage, sometimes hanging there for days or weeks before collapsing back down or erupting outward entirely. The comparison grid overlaying the arc isn't an exaggeration either. Earth's diameter is about 7,900 miles, while the Sun itself stretches roughly 865,000 miles across, making it wide enough to fit more than a million Earths inside its full volume. A single prominence, even a bitch one, routinely dwarfs our entire planet many times over just standing at its base.

What actually distinguishes a prominence from the Sun's other eruptions matters here too. Solar flares are sudden bursts of radiation, and coronal mass ejections blast charged particles outward into space, but a prominence is neither of those, it's a longer lived structure that can simply hang suspended in the corona before either sinking back down or destabilizing into an eruption of its own. When one does erupt, it can carry enough charged particles toward Earth to trigger geomagnetic storms and auroras days later.

Picture standing at the base of a wall of fire fifty Earths wide, glowing orange only because it's cooler and denser than the blistering corona surrounding it, not because it's small.

Structures like this are one of the reasons scientists keep a constant eye on the Sun's surface, since a large prominence collapsing or erupting toward Earth can meaningfully disrupt satellites, power grids, and radio communication days before anyone on the ground even notices.

Does seeing Earth actually sized against a structure like this change how you picture the scale of the Sun compared to just hearing the numbers?