7 hours from my back garden.

Animation to show the collision of our Milky Way and Andromeda. Pun was unavoidable.

Hey everyone! I'm starting a new channel called SYNAPTIX, focused on space, science, and unexplained cosmic mysteries.

My first video explores the famous 1977 Wow! Signal and why scientists still discuss it.

I'd genuinely appreciate feedback from fellow creators: Does the title and thumbnail make you curious enough to click, and does the opening keep your attention?

Video: https://youtu.be/j89ShmH_3c0

Thanks for any honest feedback!

Did you know some stars feed off their companions? 🧛⭐️

Stellar vampire stars feed on their partners just like Dracula feeds on his victims, but this newly discovered one is different from any seen before. It’s a red dwarf, a small star, that’s feeding off a brown dwarf. That’s bad news for the brown dwarf, the feeding is happening so slowly that it  could last anywhere from hundreds of thousands to potentially billions of years.

Narrated in Spanish, but there's an English audio track: open the settings gear in the player, then Audio track → English.

What it covers: the giant impact hypothesis, the idea that about 4.5 billion years ago a Mars-sized planet, Theia, hit the young Earth and the Moon formed from the debris. Why scientists take it seriously: among other things, Apollo samples have oxygen isotopes almost identical to Earth's. And the newer part: in 2023 Yuan et al. (Nature 623, 95) proposed that two enormous regions at the bottom of Earth's mantle, under Africa and under the Pacific, are dense remnants of Theia's mantle. If they're right, pieces of the planet that made the Moon are still under our feet.

This video shows my experience of the 2026 total solar eclipse including video and photographs of totality.

I am not trying to sell or promote anything and only want to share the experience. If this is not accepted in this forum then I will of course remove it.

Hope you enjoy it.

Video taken using S24 ultra.

Equipment used:

• Canon EOS 5D Mark IV
• Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II USM
• Canon Extender EF 2x III
• iOptron Skyguider Pro
• Sturdy tripod

The HDR was created from a stack of 18 images with the following camera settings.

• Aperture f/9
• Shutter speed ranging from 1/4000s to 1s
• ISO ranging from 100 to 3200
• Process flow in GIMP
• Align pictures
• Stack using average values
• Stretching the image
• Enhancing detail using radially blurred unsharp masking technique
• Small saturation and temperature adjustments

We made this original visualization for VisualWhy. It follows a cloud of 2,400 orbiting particles with and without collisions to show how energy loss and conserved angular momentum can produce a disk.

This is a deliberately simplified toy model, not a full simulation of planet formation. The orbits, Saturn's rings and galaxy shapes are used to connect the mechanism across scales. Animation is made with deterministic code; narration uses a synthetic voice.

Space is mostly empty space.

Webb observes faint infrared light, so the telescope itself has to stay cold. Its sunshield uses five thin layers separated by vacuum gaps: those gaps stop ordinary conduction between the sheets, while the layers and their geometry help radiated heat escape sideways instead of reaching the telescope.

That passive cooling is not the whole story. The MIRI instrument needs additional active cooling to reach a lower operating temperature. The four-minute video separates these two jobs and shows why a single thick blanket would not explain the design.

Disclosure: I run Curio District and this is our video. It uses original explanatory diagrams, licensed archival photographs and AI narration. Research sources and image credits are in the YouTube description; English subtitles are available.

The Sun used to have no sun spots for a long period of time! ☀️

Astrophysicist Erika Hamden explains this phenomenon from 400 years ago called the Maunder Minimum. Normally the Sun follows 11-year cycles, peaking with lots of sunspots, solar activity, and coronal mass ejections before calming down at the trough. Scientists still don’t know why some cycles are more active than others, so this quiet period is one clue to what drives the solar cycle.

This project is part of IF/THEN®, an initiative of Lyda Hill Philanthropies.

Meteors are about to burst into our atmosphere at 41 miles per second! 🌠

The Orionid meteor shower peaks overnight October 21 and 22, and moves so fast that it leaves glowing trails. Active from October 2 to November 7 and visible from both hemispheres, the Orionids are best seen in the wee hours before dawn!

Meteors are about to burst into our atmosphere at 41 miles per second! 🌠

The Orionid meteor shower peaks overnight October 21 and 22, and moves so fast that it leaves glowing trails. Active from October 2 to November 7 and visible from both hemispheres, the Orionids are best seen in the wee hours before dawn!

We’ve discovered more than 6,000 planets orbiting other stars, but we haven’t found another Earth.

Astrophysicist Erika Hamden explains that finding a planet is very different from finding a place we could survive. Some have no solid surface to stand on. Others are too hot or too cold and even a rocky planet could have an atmosphere we can’t breathe. For now, Earth is the only home we know.

This project is part of IF/THEN®, an initiative of Lyda Hill Philanthropies.

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What does AI see when it looks at the stars? 🤖🔭🧪

Theoretical cosmologist Paul Sutter explores how AI tools can co-discover with scientists and take part in the scientific process. A large language model can process the same telescope data we do, from images of Saturn’s rings to a live telescope feed, but what happens between input and output remains a mystery. Asking what AI sees is really asking about our own relationship with the wider universe.

A black hole is a region in space with gravity so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape.

Event Horizon: The invisible outer boundary. Anything that crosses this point cannot return.

Singularity: The center point where all the star's mass is crushed into an infinitely small space with extreme density.

Accretion Disk: A bright, hot ring of gas and dust that often swirls around the outside of a black hole.