🌞 The Sun Threw Off a Prominence About Half a Million Kilometres Long Today, 29 October, several space telescopes watched a colossal eruption lift off the Sun's limb and leave for space — a structure roughly 500,000 kilometres across. For scale: that is about 40 Earth diameters, or a third of the Sun's own diameter. The footage comes from the SUVI instrument on GOES-R in the extreme ultraviolet; the red palette corresponds to the 304 Å channel, the spectral line of ionised helium, which shows comparatively cool plasma at tens of thousands of degrees. The sequence covers roughly 08:30 to 17:00 Moscow time. What a prominence is. Not a cloud in the earthly sense, however much it looks like one. It is dense, comparatively cool plasma suspended in the corona on magnetic field lines. On the solar disk the same structure appears as a dark filament — it simply absorbs light from the hotter layers beneath it — while above the limb, against black space, it glows on its own. The magnetic field holds it in place against gravity and lets it grow for weeks, until the field configuration rearranges and the filament lets go. What then leaves the Sun is what astronomers call a coronal mass ejection; visually, it is the eruption of a prominence. Where it is heading. One detail matters here: the eruption is travelling sideways rather than towards Earth. Of the nearby planets, Mars appears to lie in its path. Earth might be grazed by the edge of that gas cloud, but the consequences in that case would be minor. Trajectory models will be published tomorrow morning; meanwhile it is worth looking at near-Earth conditions, which remain calm into the evening of 29 October — the solar wind is around 344 km/s and the planetary K index is hovering near 0.3. Nothing substantial has arrived at Earth, which fits a sideways eruption. One correction to a widespread notion. Prominences do carry dense, heavy gas, and the impact of such a filament on the magnetosphere can indeed drive a strong storm. But storm strength is set not by the type of eruption but by a combination of speed, density and — above all — magnetic orientation: a storm breaks out when the arriving field points opposite to Earth's. Filament eruptions often deliver only weak to moderate G1–G2 storms, or miss entirely. And G5 events are not simply a matter of a very strong flare either: they require a rare coincidence of parameters, often several eruptions in succession from a single active region, as happened in May 2024. So G3–G4 is a possible scenario, not a default minimum. For Mars this event is arguably more interesting than for Earth: the planet has no global magnetic field to deflect the flow, so the eruption interacts directly with its atmosphere and ionosphere. These are exactly the events orbiters study — and tomorrow's modelling will show whether the cloud actually hits the planet. 📎 Sources: NOAA SWPC (current conditions) · SpaceWeather.com · SUVI / GOES-R #Sun #Prominence #SpaceWeather #Astronomy #Science @science

🪐 A Dwarf Planet Candidate Found Beyond Pluto — Possibly the Largest in 20 Years On 27 October the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center announced the provisional designation 2026 ED138. The object lies about 46 astronomical units from the Sun — farther out than Pluto, whose average distance is 40 AU. Its diameter is estimated at between 600 and 1,500 km. It was found by Matthew Holman of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, who serves on the Rubin Operations team and works on the algorithms that hunt for distant moving objects. On the evening of 13 October Holman ran data Rubin had collected earlier in 2026 through a search code he wrote with colleague Kevin Napier: the code compares billions of detections of moving objects and finds those belonging to the same body. The object stood out immediately, and its brightness at that distance showed it was unusually large. Mario Jurić of the University of Washington, who leads Rubin's Solar System team, then joined in, finding about 20 additional Rubin observations from March through July, while archival data from other surveys let the team trace the orbit back to 2016. Why it went unnoticed. The object sits in a region of sky close to the plane of the Milky Way, where millions of stars drown out faint sources. Rubin, with the largest digital camera ever built, images the entire southern sky roughly every three days, and that continuity of coverage plus the search algorithms pulled it out of the clutter. It was found while the telescope was still being commissioned, before the main LSST survey began. Why "candidate". The size comes from distance, brightness and an assumed surface albedo — there is no direct measurement yet. To qualify as a dwarf planet, an object must be massive enough for its own gravity to pull it into a round shape; an icy body this large is expected to be round, but that is an expectation, not a measurement. Holman puts it plainly: "At this point, it's still a candidate. We really need to know how physically big it is, and that will take a few months, probably." Infrared observations are what will settle it. Careful with "largest". If the upper estimate holds, 2026 ED138 would be bigger than Ceres, the smallest recognised dwarf planet at about 940 km across. If the lower estimate holds, it would be smaller than Ceres and would remain simply a large trans-Neptunian object. Jurić, for his part, puts it at roughly 1,000 km and calls the find something that happens "maybe once in a generation": the largest trans-Neptunian object found in about 20 years. What comes next. If its nature is confirmed, the object would become the sixth entry on the IAU's list — Pluto, Ceres, Eris, Haumea and Makemake — receiving a permanent number and then a name. Its orbit is inclined about 25° to the plane of the Solar System, possibly a consequence of Neptune's gravitational influence. And as Holman notes, Rubin will keep imaging the southern sky for another ten years, so a handful of other such worlds may still be hiding where earlier surveys never looked. 📎 Sources: Rubin Observatory · NSF · CNN #Astronomy #Pluto #DwarfPlanets #RubinObservatory #Space #Science @science

The future may not be determined by who has access to AI, but by who can afford to deploy intelligence at scale. 🏢 Now Think About Your Own Business Imagine you’re running a successful technology company. Not a small startup. A serious organization with 5,000 or 10,000 employees. You have customers, a platform, intellectual property, revenue, and an established market position. You compete with other companies of comparable size. But what happens if one of the AI giants, equipped with dramatically superior computing infrastructure, decides to enter your industry? What if it can create, test, and scale ten competing businesses faster than your management team can organize a strategy meeting? Your company may have spent ten years building its competitive advantage. An AI-powered competitor might attempt to replicate much of that advantage in a fraction of the time. Of course, real-world businesses have regulatory barriers, relationships, physical infrastructure, trust, and other advantages that cannot simply be generated by an LLM. And AI companies may find it more profitable to sell intelligence than to compete directly in every industry. But what if they decide otherwise? 💰 The New Economics of Intelligence For centuries, economic inequality has been shaped by unequal access to land, capital, education, information, and technology. Artificial intelligence introduces another possibility: inequality based on access to computational intelligence. The paradox is almost beautiful. A technology that promises to democratize knowledge could simultaneously enable an extraordinary concentration of economic power. And perhaps the most important competitive advantage of the future won’t be your education, your talent, or even the size of your company. It will be how much intelligence you can afford. Anyway, as someone once suggested, perhaps it’s time to buy some land, grow corn, raise goats, and start making wine. At least until AI figures out how to do that better, too. 🍷 🙂 Not a bug. A feature.