Dr Kirsten Banks

🚨 New discovery alert! 🚨 Astronomers have just captured something we've never seen before: the birth of a solar system. 🍼🪐 Yes, we've spotted baby planets before, but never this early in their development. The star system is called HOPS-315, located in Orion about 1,370 light-years away, and it’s giving us a glimpse of what our own Sun might’ve looked like when it was just 100,000 to 200,000 years old. Here’s what’s happening: Scientists used ALMA (which sees in submillimetre wavelengths, between infrared and radio light) to capture this image of HOPS-315. They saw a disk of silicon monoxide forming around the baby star. But here’s the wild part: that material is condensing into crystalline silicates. These are the exact kind of minerals we find on Earth in sand, rock, and even concrete. 🪨 Why is that so cool? Because these are the first solid ingredients believed to kick off planet formation, and exactly what we think happened in our Solar System 4.5 billion years ago. 🌍 Until now, we could only guess that this happened in other systems based on asteroid samples. But now we've seen it in action in a different star system. So... are we special? Or is this just how planets are made across the cosmos? Here’s the original research if you want to dive deeper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09163-z #Astronomy #SpaceNews #PlanetFormation #SolarSystem #ALMA

Peacocks have LASERS?! 🦚 Scientists in the US have found that there are structures in the eyespots of a peacock's feathers that naturally turn light into laser light. But what makes light laser light? Basically, laser light is light that is one colour, and one colour only, and the light is strengthened by bouncing the light back and forth (aka amplified) and aligned perfectly (aka it's coherent). Leave a comment if you know what the LASER acronym stands for... So, what did researchers find with peacocks? Well, they found evidence of optical cavities, an area where light can get bounced back and forth to become amplified and coherent, turning it into laser light. And some of those structures emit specific green laser light, and other spots emit specific yellow/orange laser light! The mechanism behind how peacocks make these lasers work is still a mystery... As is the reason why evolution decided to give peacocks lasers in the first place, but damn, this is cool! #peacocks #lasers #science #physics #nature

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The Andromeda Galaxy is moving toward us at 110 km/s... But... shouldn’t it be moving away if the universe is expanding? Here’s the deal: Yes, the universe is expanding. Distant galaxies are zooming away from us, and the farther they are, the faster they go. But Andromeda is only 2.5 million light-years away. That’s basically next door in cosmic terms. At that distance, gravity beats the universe’s expansion. The Milky Way and Andromeda are massive, and their gravity is strong enough to pull them together. So instead of drifting apart, they’re on a collision course… Or maybe not. Latest research suggests there’s a 50/50 chance we’ll collide with Andromeda in the next 10 billion years. #Astronomy #MilkyWay #Andromeda #SpaceFacts #GalaxyCollision #UniverseExpansion

🚨 We’ve just spotted the third object EVER that came from outside the Solar System. Meet 3I/ATLAS! Spotted on July 1st by the ATLAS survey, this fast-moving mystery object is currently zooming toward the inner Solar System at 245,000 km/h (152,000 mph)! So, how do we know it’s interstellar? Firstly, it's moving way too fast to be bound by the Sun’s gravity And its orbital path has an eccentricity of 6.4... that's the most extreme we’ve seen! Is it a comet? An asteroid? We’re not sure yet. But as it gets closer to the Sun, we’ll find out more. And I’ll keep you posted! #SpaceNews #Astronomy #3IATLAS #SolarSystem #Comet #Asteroid #ATLAS

“That’s 22 mph… if you’re from a country that landed people on the Moon.” 👀 Look, I got a few comments like this on my video about Hot Wheels physics when I said the metric system is better for science. So I did some digging… During the Apollo missions, NASA actually used the metric system for calculations. But for the astronauts? They converted the results into U.S. Customary Units (not even imperial) so it was easier to understand in flight. So yeah. The metric system did all the heavy lifting. Oh, and remember the Mars Climate Orbiter? It failed because someone didn’t convert from U.S. units to metric. 😬 Moral of the story? Metric for the maths. Convert for the humans. #Metric#Apollo #ScienceFacts #SpaceNerd #NASA

Replying to @m.t._empty Comets are massive! Some are tens of kilometres across, so there's a lot of material to vaporise each time they pass the Sun. But they do run out eventually! Roughly 6% of near-Earth asteroids might actually be extinct comets. These are comets that lost their tail and fizzled out. Only 10% of long-period comets survive more than 50 orbits. That’s about 10,000 years of cosmic flybys... A long time by our standards, but short in cosmic time. Halley’s Comet, for example, could break apart in the next few tens of thousands of years. But sometimes, comets "run out" dramatically! Some get too close to the Sun and break into pieces. One even crashed into Jupiter. 💥 So, comets seem immortal… but they’re not. They just live on a schedule way longer than ours. #Comets #HalleyComet #SpaceFacts #AstronomyTok #SolarSystem #Astrophysics

Replying to @el_neebo The Sun is a star, but we only figured that out about 100 years ago 👀🌞✨ If we compare the stars to the Sun, they seem completely different: ☀️ The Sun shows up during the day, stars come out at night ☀️ The Sun is a big glowing circle, stars are tiny dots ☀️ The Sun is hot, stars don’t warm us at all So what changed? Spectroscopy. That’s when you split light into a rainbow and read the “barcode” hidden in those colours. Scientists saw that sunlight and starlight shared very similar barcodes… meaning they’re made of the same stuff! And that’s how we finally realised that the Sun is just a star up close. #SpaceFacts #AstronomyTok #StarStuff #SpaceNerd #Astrophysics

👏 We now know how clapping actually makes sound. Spoiler: it’s not your hands smacking together... it’s the air trapped between them! That air gets compressed and then escapes through gaps, creating vibrations… aka sound. Physics: 1 Everything I thought I knew about clapping: 0 I’m 100% doing a longer video on this. Drop your questions below and stay tuned! 🙌 Shoutout to @mrearthguy for initially bringing this across my radar! #RoundOfApplause #Clapping #SoundWaves #PhysicsFacts #Physics

These are just test images… and they’re already mind-blowing. 🤯 In just over 10 hours, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory spotted: ✨ Millions of stars 🌌 Millions of galaxies ☄️ And 2,104 brand-new asteroids! And this is only the beginning. Rubin is starting a 10-year mission to scan the entire night sky every single night. No breaks. It’s like putting the universe on time-lapse. 🌀 We’ll see pulsating stars, comets, supernovae, and maybe even never-before-seen cosmic phenomena. Named after dark matter pioneer Vera Rubin, this observatory is continuing her legacy in the most epic way. And in its first year alone? It'll collect more data than all other optical observatories combined. 😱 So yeah... this isn’t just exciting. This is revolutionary. And it’s only the beginning. #VeraRubin #RubinObservatory #Astronomy #DarkMatter #SpaceScience #Astrophysics

I said the metric system is superior, and… I may have upset a few people. 😅 So, to ease the tension, let me share some of the wonderfully ridiculous units scientists actually use: 🔹 A parsec? Just trigonometry pretending to be a distance. 🔹 A barn? It’s the cross-section of a uranium nucleus. Why is it called that? No one really knows. 🔹 A microbarn is an outhouse. 🔹 A yoctobarn? That’s a shed. ☢️ Radiation? Sometimes measured in bananas. Yes, because bananas are naturally radioactive. 🦀 And if you're an X-ray astronomer? You measure brightness in Crabs... as in, the Crab Nebula. 1 Crab = Crab Nebula bright. So sure, the metric system is elegant... but science also has crabs, bananas, and sheds. And honestly? I kind of love that chaotic energy. #PhysicsIsWeird #SpaceFacts #ScienceHumour #AstronomyTikTok #UnitsYouDidntKnowExisted

What does time feel like near a black hole? ⏳🕳️ The more massive a black hole is, the more it warps space and time. That’s why when you get closer, time passes more slowly for you compared to someone far away. It’s called gravitational time dilation—and yes, it’s very real. 🎬 In Interstellar, every tick on Miller’s planet equals a whole day on Earth. That’s not just sci-fi—it’s rooted in real physics! #BlackHoles #TimeDilation #Interstellar #Astrophysics #SpaceTime #ScienceFacts

Replying to @nakorsreprieve ⚠️ This ring is expanding faster than the speed of light... but how?! Isn’t light the ultimate speed limit? It’s called superluminal motion, and it’s a mind-bending illusion caused by geometry, timing, and light itself. 💡🌀 In this Hubble image of a supernova in the Centaurus A galaxy, the light echoes reflecting off surrounding dust look like they’re expanding 37x faster than light speed, but they’re not actually breaking physics. Just your brain. 🧠✨ And thank you to our community member for the brilliant Moon-laser analogy, it’s such a good way to wrap your head around this! #Astronomy #Astrophysics #SpaceTikTok #ScienceTok #STEM

We're halfway through 2025... yikes! But here's everything interesting that has happened in the world of space, at least to me, so far this year. From the building blocks of life found on an asteroid, to 128 new moons found orbiting Saturn, and maybe, maybe not, signs of life found on a distant exoplanet. I can't wait for what the rest of 2025 brings us! See more in my longer video on YT. #2025 #space #astro #asteroid #saturn #alien #exoplanet

Replying to @bussy.king Do we have actual pictures of colliding galaxies? YES! And they are chef’s kiss 🔥 So let’s talk galaxy mergers while you check them out: 💥 Binary vs multiple mergers (2 vs 3+ galaxies) ⚖️ Major vs minor (similar size or one tiny) 💧 Wet vs dry vs damp (how much gas they’ve got) Milky Way + Andromeda? That’s a wet one. 🌌 💫 In a major merger, galaxies can lose up to 50% of their stellar mass 🚀 And there's a 50% chance the Solar System will get YEETED out of the Milky Way when Andromeda arrives 🕰 And the whole process takes billions of years Honestly, the universe is dramatic. ✨ What’s your favourite galaxy merger fact? Tell me below 👇 #GalaxyMergers #SpaceFacts #Astrophysics #AstronomyTok #FunSpaceFacts

This galaxy is basically invisible. 👻🌀 It emits almost no light, has barely any stars, and over 98% of its mass is dark matter. Scientists think it could be a “dark galaxy” and it could be one of the first found in the nearby universe, just 94 million light-years away. And here’s the wild part: it does have gas, meaning it might be in the earliest stage of galaxy formation. This could help us unlock why some galaxies stay dark while others light up with stars. #DarkGalaxy #DarkMatter #GalaxyFormation #Space #Astrophysics #ScienceTok

Replying to @thebadastronomer We found it! That mysterious Hubble supernova timelapse? Turns out it is real! Huge thank you to Phil Plait (you legend!) for pointing me to the original source by Judy Schmidt, complete with a link to the scientific paper so we can learn all the juicy details. 🔗 https://www.flickr.com/photos/geckzilla/49521695336/in/photostream/ This supernova exploded in Centaurus A, about 12 million light-years away. This time-lapse spans 1.5 years of the explosion’s aftermath, capturing not one, but FOUR light echoes! And, what's most wild, those light echoes appear to travel up to 37 times the speed of light. 🫨 Don’t worry, no physics is being broken... It’s an optical illusion called superluminal motion. Not only is this beautiful, but it’s also science history: it includes the earliest ever detection of a light echo after a supernova. Big love to Phil Plait and Judy Schmidt for helping us learn more about this amazing cosmic event! 🌌 #Supernova #SpaceScience #Hubble #LightEcho #Astrophysics

🚨 BREAKING: The Milky Way might not crash into Andromeda after all?! New research used 100,000 simulations based on Hubble and Gaia data to test whether our galaxy will collide with Andromeda in the next 10 billion years… 🌀 Only 2% showed the classic head-on crash in 4–5 billion years. ✨ Around half ended in a merger, but much later. 🤯 And the rest? No collision at all within 10 billion years! Turns out, our galactic sidekicks, the Large Magellanic Cloud and M33, are making things way more complicated. So yeah… the future of our island universe? Still up for debate. #MilkyWay #Andromeda #SpaceNews #Astrophysics

Why do stars twinkle, but planets don’t? ✨ Here's what's going on: Even though stars are usually much bigger than planets, they're really far away, making them look like tiny points of light in the sky. Planets, however, are much closer, so they take up more of the sky, looking like little disks or orbs. Since stars appear as just a point of light in the sky, they're more affected by our atmosphere. Our atmosphere is kind of chaotic... there’s wind, different temperatures, wobbly turbulence… And as light travels through it, that turbulence knocks the light around, making stars appear to twinkle. Since planets are closer, their light is more like spread-out beams, even if the light gets jiggled around, it kinda evens out and appears more stable compared to stars. Unless the weather’s bad, or the planet’s low in the sky, then you might catch a twinkle or two! #science #space #stargazing #planets #Astronomy

Replying to @yabababaduskymambo Did Hubble really capture a star exploding? That’s what this viral video claims: a time-lapse of a supernova caught by the Hubble Space Telescope. So I went searching for the original. I checked NASA, ESA, Hubble’s archive… nothing. No matching supernova. No light echo. No official release. Reverse image search? Just more viral posts giving contradictory info. Some say it’s from 60 million light-years away, others say 10. I finally found a name for the supernova, supposedly in Centaurus A, but even that didn’t turn up anything verifiable. So is this real? I really don't know! Moral of the story? Science communication needs sources and details. It helps people trust the cool stuff you're sharing. It also helps nerds like me find the facts behind the fireworks. 🙃 #Hubble #Supernova #Astronomy #SpaceFacts #SciComm