George's Random Astronomical Object
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 overall weirdness.
- Update frequency
- every 14 days
- Average duration
- 10 minutes
- Episodes
- 157
- Years Active
- 2019 - 2025
Object 97: A Runaway Cow
Mu Columbae is a bright, blue star that was ejected from the Orion Nebula in a complex gravitational interaction involving three other stars.
00:11:24 |
Mon 01 May 2023
Object 96: The Proof-Of-Concept Exoplanet
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.
00:11:29 |
Mon 17 Apr 2023
Object 95: Two Non-Archaeological Relics
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.
00:08:06 |
Mon 03 Apr 2023
Object 94: So Hot and So Small
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…
00:08:22 |
Mon 20 Mar 2023
Object 93: Superthin
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.
00:09:05 |
Tue 07 Mar 2023
Object 92: Look at This Elliptical Galaxy Instead
The elliptical galaxy contains an abnormal amount of interstellar dust with no accompanying interstellar gas, which is weird.
00:11:43 |
Mon 20 Feb 2023
Object 91: The Second Air Pump Galaxy
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.
00:11:26 |
Mon 06 Feb 2023
Object 90: The Globular Cluster in a Forest Fire
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 intereste…
00:09:17 |
Mon 23 Jan 2023
Object 89: Relationship Status - It's Complicated
R Aquarii could be described as one of the closest symbiotic binary star systems to Earth, but it's more complicated than that.
00:08:57 |
Mon 09 Jan 2023
Object 88: Some Sort of Weird, Ultraviolet Freak of Nature
NGC 6052 looks like a spiral galaxy smashing into a wall of stars, which is more or less what is actually happening.
00:11:30 |
Mon 26 Dec 2022
Object 87: The Fake Sphere
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.
00:09:31 |
Mon 28 Nov 2022
Object 86: Two Hellscapes Orbiting a Red Dwarf
The red dwarf HD 260655 has two large, hot, rocky planets orbiting very close to it.
00:12:44 |
Mon 14 Nov 2022
Object 85: The Swedish Stellar Superstore
As the largest open cluster that anyone has found in the Milky Way, Westerlund 1 contains a lot of rare and weird stars.
00:12:05 |
Mon 31 Oct 2022
Object 84: Eccentricity
The evolved red star HD 214362 is orbiting the center of the Milky Way in a very eccentric way (as in either its orbit is a very elongated ellipse or its orbit is just plainly strange).
00:09:08 |
Mon 17 Oct 2022
Object 83: Number 1 in 1970
In 1970, the quasar 4C 05.34 was the most distant known object in the universe, but this is not the only interesting fact about this object.
00:13:58 |
Mon 03 Oct 2022
Object 82: Officially Peculiar
A large mass of gas fell into the lenticular galaxy NGC 3593 about 2 billion years ago, and this gas both changed the appearance of the galaxy and also created new stars that now orbit the galaxy in …
00:09:17 |
Mon 19 Sep 2022
Object 81: Unusually Shocking
What may be most interesting about the pulsar PSR J2124-3358 is not that it is spinning very rapidly but that stellar winds from the pulsar have collided with the interstellar medium, producing a glo…
00:09:50 |
Mon 05 Sep 2022
Object 80: The Confusing and Controversial Names Episode
The star WR 124 (also called Merrill's Star, although that name ignores two of the people involved in the discovery) is a really hot Wolf-Rayet star that has produced the surrounding nebula M1-67 (wh…
00:10:47 |
Mon 22 Aug 2022
Object 79: The Magic of Circumstellar Semantics
The star HD 131835 had a circumstellar disk of dust and gas that technically is neither a debris disk nor a protoplanetary disk but instead some sort of weird hybrid of these two things.
00:11:39 |
Mon 08 Aug 2022
Object 78: A Dwarf Galaxy with Something for Everyone
Located within the Local Group, the dwarf galaxy IC 1613 has been popular with professional astronomers for a variety of reasons, and it is also a notable albeit difficult-to-see amateur astronomy ob…
00:12:03 |
Mon 25 Jul 2022
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