š§š¦¦Pass the otter popsāitās World Otter Day!
The last Wednesday of May is a yearly celebration of otters, raising awareness and inspiring people around the world to help protect these irreplaceable aquatic mammals.Ā
This year weāre showing up to the party with lots of love for our resident southern sea otters and the exceptional team that makes sure our girls are happy, healthy, and ready for their close up!Ā
Opal, Ivy, Selka,Ā Suri, and Willow are all on exhibit together right now, but thatās not always the caseāfor a great reason. š
All of our non-releasable resident otters sometimes spend time behind the scenes as part of our Sea Otter Program. We aim for our resident otters to also serve as surrogate mothers to orphaned otter pups, raising them with the skills and behaviors they need for a second chance at life in the wild. š„¹
Today, almost 300 rescued southern sea otters of all ages have been released back to their ocean home after being cared for in our Sea Otter Program, helping restore their populations and revive the beautiful coastal habitats they call home. š¦¦š Thereās wonder in ocean life and caring for it helps us all.
Join the World Otter Day sea-lebration on our live Sea Otter Cam, streaming the lovable antics of these five otter conservation superstars fromĀ 7 to 7. ā
How are you celebrating otters today?
Grand Master of the European Science Fiction Society, Passed away in GijĆ³n,on 13 April 2026.
May he rest in peace.
A lot of people I have met rag on Watson's work for 40k, because it was written during the organic time of the universe, and was also the era GW hired established authors outside of the company to write things instead of just publishing fanfic authors in the post 2000 era.
I personally found his writing to fit the insane, gallows humor, sci fi-horror/action that 40k was originally pitched as in its early years. I think to this day it gives a hell of a lot more inspiration than the run of the mill; "Imperial dude #489765300276 kills a million billion chaos/xenos dudes and wins the day for the somehow always on the back foot, always apparently down trodden poor little bean that is the imperium."
At some point, an oligrach is going to spend a billion and as long as they are helping Republicans, Constitutional conservatives will day nothing. If the billion goes toward a Democrat, the conservatives will all flip and cry about Founding Fathers.
The best government money can buy! The Heritage Foundation and their allies have been running a slow-moving coup since before Reagan. We are now experiencing their bitter harvest.
This artistās impression visualizes a variety of terrestrial planets.
There are several ways to find a planet, but most methods are best at discovering worlds that are gargantuan, ultra-close to their star, or both. Those toasty, star-hugging planets are fascinating, however astronomers want to find more familiar worlds too. One of the most mind-bending planet hunting methods, called microlensing, promises to reveal planets like those in our solar system thanks to tiny wrinkles in space-time.
Microlensing is a light-bending phenomenon that occurs because anything that has mass warps the fabric of space-time, sort of like the sag a bowling ball makes when set on a trampoline. The effect is extreme around the heftiest objects, like black holes and entire galaxies. But even stars and planets cause a detectable degree of warping.
This animation illustrates the concept of gravitational microlensing. When one star in the sky appears to pass nearly in front of another, the light rays of the background source star become bent due to the warped space-time around the foreground star. This star acts like a virtual magnifying glass, amplifying the brightness of the background source star. If the nearer star harbors a planetary system, then those planets can also act as lenses, each one producing a short deviation in the brightness of the source. When astronomers find planets this way, they can measure their mass and orbital distance from their host star.
Hereās how it works. Light travels in a straight line, but if space-time is bent ā which happens near something massive, like a star ā light follows the curve. Any time two stars align closely from our vantage point, light from the more distant star curves as it travels through the warped space-time around the nearer star.
If the alignment is especially close, the nearer star acts like a cosmic lens, focusing and amplifying light from the background star. Planets orbiting the foreground star may also modify the lensed light, acting as their own tiny magnifying glasses. Astronomers see the effect as a spike in the starās brightness.
This animation illustrates how a star and orbiting planet can lens light from a farther star when they align from our vantage point.
Even for powerful telescopes, itās extremely difficult to see these little surges of starlight. For one thing, theyāre rare ā they rely on chance alignments between two widely separated and unrelated stars drifting through space. And the signals often only last a few hours before disappearing forever, so there is some luck involved.
Telescopes on the ground also have to peer through Earthās hazy atmosphere, which can make images too blurry to tell different stars apart. Put all that together, and itās little surprise that less than 5% of known exoplanets have been found using this method so far.
A rogue planet drifts through the galaxy alone, untethered to a star.
But microlensing can reveal a wide variety of worlds, including ones too small or far from their host star for other methods to detect. While other techniques are biased toward bizarre planets, like lava worlds and hot Jupiters, microlensing is best suited to finding familiar ones ā worlds in their starās habitable zone and even farther out.Ā
That includes ice giants, like Uranus and Neptune in our solar system, and even rogue planets ā worlds freely roaming the galaxy unbound to any stars.
Most microlensing exoplanets discovered so far were found by ground based observatories, though our retired Kepler and Spitzer space telescopes found a few too. Soon our Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will begin surveying the cosmos, and its wide, sharp view will take us from dozens of microlensing planets to more than a thousand! Who knows how many Earth-like planets will be among them?
Make sure toĀ follow us on TumblrĀ for your regular dose of space!
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