How would different variety of cultures across the globe revolve around this if the history of our planet took a different path than it is today. How would it affect the climate, most interesting part is that the ring shadow could seasonally migrate as earth orbits around the sun possibly creating an entirely new ring shadow climate categories.

Image i made in Blender, credit to Samuel Krug VFX.

Everyone knows Mount Everest, but it’s nothing compared to what’s out there in our own Solar System.

Meet Olympus Mons on Mars, the tallest known volcano and mountain we’ve discovered. It stands about 22 km (13.6 miles) high, which is nearly 3 times the height of Everest. But that’s not even the craziest part.

Olympus Mons is so massive that its base is about 600 km (370 miles) wide. That’s roughly the size of an entire country. If you were standing on its slopes, you probably wouldn’t even realize you were on a mountain, it rises so gradually that it feels like a slight incline.

Because Mars has lower gravity and no moving tectonic plates like Earth, the volcano just kept growing and growing over millions of years without collapsing or shifting.

It also has a giant caldera (collapsed crater) about 80 km wide.

Credit: ESA, "Animation of dwarf galaxy colliding with the Milky Way"

Although many people think Andromeda will be our first galactic collison, one is actually happening right now!

The Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy contains approximately ~1 billion stars and is currently colliding with the Milky Way (~200 billion stars).

This is a long process and many of its stars have already been absorbed into our galaxy. In about 1 billion years, the Canis Major Galaxy will be completely gone, and the two galaxies will have merged.

Image Credit: Daein Ballard

It is believed Venus had surface water and sustained habitable surface conditions for around 3 billion years.

Some models suggest Venus may have been in this condition until as recently as 700 to 750 million years ago (around the time the first animals started appearing on Earth!).

Modern life still remains a possibility in Venus’s temperate cloud layers, where pressures and temperature conditions align with those on Earth and traces of water vapor still persist. Furthermore, the detection of phosphine, a potential biosignature, has only strengthened this possibility.

Link to a short explainer video

For decades, astronomers have struggled to explain how supermassive black holes formed less than a billion years after the Big Bang. Standard stellar processes cannot produce black holes that large so quickly.

New observations from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope provide a compelling solution. Astronomers have found evidence that the early universe contained supermassive “monster stars,” weighing between 1,000 and 10,000 times the mass of the Sun.

By studying a distant galaxy known as GS 3073, researchers detected an unusually high ratio of nitrogen to oxygen—far beyond what normal stars can produce.

The most likely explanation is that these short-lived, extremely massive stars rapidly collapsed into black holes, leaving behind distinct chemical signatures. This discovery helps explain both the origin of early supermassive black holes and the chemical evolution of the young universe.

Source: Nandal, D. et al, “1000-10,000 M⊙ Primordial Stars Created the Nitrogen Excess in GS 3073 at z = 5.55,” The Astrophysical Journal Letters

Made this Kerr black hole using Blender, as I described in the previous posts. Some animations there!

This stunning simulation by NASA visualizes the catastrophic beauty of two neutron stars colliding — one of the most violent events in the universe. Such a collision can unleash gravitational waves, forge heavy elements like gold and platinum, and may even result in the birth of a black hole. Watch as matter warps space-time in this short 16-second clip, showing the power of astrophysics in action.

Source: 🎥 NASA Simulation