Betelgeuse stopped dimming in the middle of February, and now some of the first papers studying the anomalous brightness variation are starting to appear. It doesn't look like the star got cooler, there wasn't a giant starspot that lowered the output, and there wasn't a cloud of gas in the way. Instead it seems like dust is likely to be the culprit. We have some great images by the star using the SPHERE instrument at ESO, taken by Miguel Montargès showing a darker area on the star, this shows that the dimming wasn't a global event. There's another image from December showing the dust environment further out from the star taken by Pierre Kervell using the VISIR instrument. However the most interesting evidence is comes from a team who did spectroscopy, trying to figure out if the star had god cooler. I want to cover this paper by Emily M. Levesque & Philip Massey "Betelgeuse Just Isn't That Cool: Effective Temperature Alone Cannot Explain the Recent Dimming of Betelgeuse" https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.10463 Because it offers a good explanation of how astronomers have to go about finding the temperature of stars and because Emily wrote an excellent Twitter thread explaining their process https://twitter.com/emsque/status/1232730880478765057?s=20 ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnE4RTk3MCU

Moho is one of the hardest places to land in Kerbal Space Program, in addition to needing lots of delta-v to actually get there it has an atmosphere which will cause your engines to overheat. I try to cover what you need to know to make the actual landing and return as easy as possible. Kerbal Space Program is an indie game developed by Squad, download it from http://www.kerbalspaceprogram.com ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_r3A6M4tLE

What if the Universal Logo was real? Wren From Corridor Digital asked me this question and expected some bad stuff, but the more I crunched numbers the more the world looked doomed. Universe Sandbox was used for some of the visualizations https://universesandbox.com/ SpaceSim is a new project from the creator of OpenSPH https://pavelsevecek.github.io/ Orbit diagram by CMGlee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Comparison_satellite_navigation_orbits.svg Follow me on Twitter for more updates: https://twitter.com/DJSnM I have a discord server where I regularly turn up: https://discord.gg/zStmKbM If you really like what I do you can support me directly through Patreon https://www.patreon.com/scottmanley ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBxb6LRFG08

Demonstrating how spacecraft capsules don't just fall through the atmosphere, but can be flown using the aerodynamic properties of the design. Stock Kerbal Space Program doesn't quite do this, but a simple edit make it possible to emulate the real thing. ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgTNzDCc0gk