George's Random Astronomical Object is a biweekly astronomy podcast featuring science discussions about astronomical objects at randomly selected locations in the sky. The wide range of topics discussed in the show include stars, variable stars, variable variable stars, supermassive black holes, ultracool dwarf stars, exoplanets, howler monkeys, infrared radiation, acronyms, more acronyms, starbursts, measurements of less than 12 parsecs, jellyfish galaxies, diffuse ionized gas, and general ...
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The star at the center of the planetary nebula NGC 7094 is almost but not quite a white dwarf, making it a rather unusual object for astronomers to look at.Par George Bendo
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One of the spiral arms in the galaxy NGC 3110 is producing unusually huge amounts of new stars as well as unusually huge amounts of infrared emission.Par George Bendo
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Object 132: I Need a 2002 Pop Culture Reference
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The radio source PMN J0134-0931 created a lot of excitement in 2002 when people discovered that it was a quasar gravitationally lensed by another galaxy in front of it, they were really excited.Par George Bendo
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Hydrus I is a very small, ultrafaint dwarf galaxy orbiting the Milky Way that was accidentally (or, to use the technical term, serendipitously) found by the Dark Energy Survey.Par George Bendo
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NGC 4261 was made famous when Hubble Space Telescope observations in the 1990s showed that this elliptical galaxy contains a supermassive black hole.Par George Bendo
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The very small Pyxis Cluster orbits the Milky Way in such an extremely extended orbit that it travels further away than many of the dwarf galaxies orbiting our galaxy.Par George Bendo
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The NGC 6221/NGC 6215 Group of galaxies contains a bridge-like structure of hydrogen gas connecting the two spiral galaxies within the group as well as a dwarf galaxy that looks like it formed within the bridge.Par George Bendo
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Object 127: The Nebraska Blue Straggler Special
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The open cluster NGC 188 is peculiar not only because it is very old for an open cluster but also because it contains an unusual number of blue stars for a cluster of its age.Par George Bendo
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Object 126: Do Not Mention Exoplanet b Again
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HD 181433 has three exoplanets, two of which are gas giants with very unusually elongated orbits that have been very challenging to properly measure.Par George Bendo
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HR 1099 (also known as V711 Tauri) was instrumental in showing that magnetic fields play a major role in causing the variability of stars within the RS CVn class of variable star systems.Par George Bendo
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Most people would associate Castor with Pollux, which are the two brightest stars in the constellation Gemini, but Castor by itself is very interesting because it is actually a very complex system containing six stars.Par George Bendo
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The quasar QSO 1331+170 is best known for having a darker galaxy in front of it that is absorbing its light.Par George Bendo
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The cluster of galaxies MACS J1149.5+2223 is so massive that it has gravitationally bent (or lensed) the light from multiple things behind it, including one of the most distant galaxies in the universe and a supernova.Par George Bendo
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NGC 34 (also known as NGC 17) is a chaotic-looking galaxy that formed from two smaller galaxies merging together, and it is a place where astronomers have easily found lots of stars forming in a starburst but where they have had difficulty concluding whether the galaxy also contains a supermassive black hole.…
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Object 120: A Possible Source of the Cosmic Rays that Gave the Fantastic Four Their Superpowers
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The Monogem Ring, which is one of the largest sources of X-rays in the Earth's sky, was created by a supernova explosion about 86000 years ago, and the core of the star that exploded has been identified as the pulsar PSR B0656+14 at the center of the ring.Par George Bendo
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Even though Alpha Mensae is in one of the faintest and dumbest constellations in the sky, it's an intriguing star system because it is very close to the Earth, because one of the stars is very Sun-like, and because it may contain an exoplanet or a disk of dust in orbit around that Sun-like star.Par George Bendo
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Object 118: The Golden Standard
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The Type Ia supernova SN 2005cf was observed at multiple wavelengths for three months after its appearance, allowing astronomers to create templates of its spectrum that could be used to measure distances to other Type Ia supernovae.Par George Bendo
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Kappa Cassiopeiae is a large blue variaable star that is most potentially interesting because of the bow shock between its stellar winds and the interstellar medium.Par George Bendo
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47 Ursa Majoris is a nearby Sun-like star that astronomers have intensely studied in an effort to find an Earth-like exoplanet, and while three exoplanets have been found orbiting the star, none of them are remotely similar to the Earth.Par George Bendo
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While the planetary nebula NGC 1501 is a popular amateur astronomy target, the newly formed, hot, pulsating white dwarf at its center is much more interesting to professional astronomers.Par George Bendo
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Object 114: George's 2020 Data Processing Project from Hell
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As the second closest spiral galaxy to the Milky Way, Messier 33 has been a very popular observing target for both amateur and professional astronomers, and even I have made images of the galaxy.Par George Bendo
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The white dwarf GD 394 seems to have an abnormal amount of heavy elements in its outer atmosphere and also varies in brightness with a period of 1.146 days, and no one understands why.Par George Bendo
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The Norma Cluster lies near the center of a giant supercluster of galaxies that is pulling in everything else in the local universe, including our galaxy.Par George Bendo
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The classical nova RR Pictoris was one of the brightest and closest to ever appear in the sky.Par George Bendo
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Object 110: We Came, We Saw, We Measured
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The spiral galaxy Markarian 766 contains an active galactic nucleus with a supermassive black hole, which means that everyone needs to apply their favorite technique to measure the black hole's mass.Par George Bendo
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Object 109: A Water World without Kevin Costner
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The Kepler-138 star system contains at least four exoplanets, one of which may be a "water world" covered in a very deep ocean.Par George Bendo
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Object 108: Objects in the Mirror May Be More Complicated Than They Appear
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The protostellar object PDS 70 has a very complicated protoplanetary system that includes a disk of gas and dust and two protoexoplanets.Par George Bendo
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Object 107: The Red Rectangle
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The Red Rectangle (yes, the Red Rectangle) is a uniquely weird protoplanetary nebula formed by a uniquely weird binary star system.Par George Bendo
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Object 106: A Tale of Two Binary Star Systems
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While some astronomers are interested the globular cluster NGC 6712 because it appears to have been severely tidally disrupted by orbiting too close to the center of the Milky Way, other astronomers are interested in the cluster because it contains a couple of weird yet similar binary star systems.Par George Bendo
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Object 105: Super-Slow Star Formation
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Located at the edge of the Local Group, the Sagittarius Dwarf Irregular Galaxy has some of the stars with the fewest elements other than hydrogen or helium in the known universe.Par George Bendo
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Observations with a telescope as large as the Untied States were needed to prove that J16021+3326 is a blazar, a type of galaxy containing a supermassive black hole.Par George Bendo
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PSR B1509-58 is a relatively young pulsar that sits within a supernova remnant that looks like a giant hand.Par George Bendo
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The spiral galaxy NGC 7552 is best known for its relatively small but bright starburst ring.Par George Bendo
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The star Eta Corvi is surrounded by a disk of dust with a rather complex structure and rather complex origin.Par George Bendo
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Object 100: The Self-Descriptive Nebula
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The Taurus Molecular Cloud is exactly what it sounds like it is, a cloud made of mulecular gas (mostly molecular hydrogen) in the constellation Taurus, but it is also much more than that.Par George Bendo
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Abell 514 is a cluster of galaxies that contains six radio galaxies, and the polarized radio emission from those six radio galaxies can be used to probe the magnetic fields within the cluster.Par George Bendo
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Object 98: Double the Black Holes for Double the Fun
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Markarian 266 is a pair of merging galaxies that now contains two supermassive black holes.Par George Bendo
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Mu Columbae is a bright, blue star that was ejected from the Orion Nebula in a complex gravitational interaction involving three other stars.Par George Bendo
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Object 96: The Proof-Of-Concept Exoplanet
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WASP-1 was the first star identified as having an exoplanet by the Wide Angle Search for Planets and thus helped to validate the techniques used by that survey.Par George Bendo
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The cluster Abell 168 formed from the merger of two smaller clusters, and this had many weird effects on the intracluster gas between the galaxies.Par George Bendo
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WD 2211-495 is a small, hot white dwarf with a rather unusual amount of heavy elements in its outer atmosphere, implying that something from a surrounding planetary system occasionally falls into the star.Par George Bendo
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UGC 7321 is an unusually flat (or superthin) spiral galaxy, which is indicative of how it has avoided gravitational interactions with other galaxies that could alter its shape.Par George Bendo
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Object 92: Look at This Elliptical Galaxy Instead
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The elliptical galaxy contains an abnormal amount of interstellar dust with no accompanying interstellar gas, which is weird.Par George Bendo
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Object 91: The Second Air Pump Galaxy
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Antlia 2, which was recently found orbiting the Milky Way, is the most diffuse galaxy that anyone has ever discovered up to this point in time.Par George Bendo
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UKS 1 probably lies on the far side of the Milky Way, and the light from the cluster is heavily obscured by interstellar dust, but even though it's hard to see, astronomers are still really interested in it.Par George Bendo
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R Aquarii could be described as one of the closest symbiotic binary star systems to Earth, but it's more complicated than that.Par George Bendo
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Object 88: Some Sort of Weird, Ultraviolet Freak of Nature
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NGC 6052 looks like a spiral galaxy smashing into a wall of stars, which is more or less what is actually happening.Par George Bendo
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Although at first NGC 6781 may look like a spherical planetary nebula, it actually has a cylindrical shape, which has rather complex scientific implications for analyzing this object.Par George Bendo
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Object 86: Two Hellscapes Orbiting a Red Dwarf
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The red dwarf HD 260655 has two large, hot, rocky planets orbiting very close to it.Par George Bendo
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Object 85: The Swedish Stellar Superstore
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As the largest open cluster that anyone has found in the Milky Way, Westerlund 1 contains a lot of rare and weird stars.Par George Bendo
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