a fragment cast adrift

Your entire life, you walked within and beside a light beyond explanation. And here in the dark, that light may extinguish, and as it does, all hope of answering those questions vanishes into shadow along with it. In this horrid place you watch as a doom you have avoided so many times, countless battlefields of the Falconer's Rebellion. You should have died in the dungeons of Castle Delawney. You should have died in Sloak. You should have died in the war. Whatever comes next, at least your brother won't have to go there alone. What is Teor's experience of this final moment?

Go in peace. 🌩️

Tide-pooling at Botanical Beach, Port Renfrew, BC

This view of a crescent Mars was captured on May 15, by NASA’s Psyche mission as it approached the planet for a gravity assist.

Turns out that the ancient star system Terzan 5 is not a globular star cluster, a classification that typically has only one ancient star population. New data not only confirms the existence of two distinct populations of stars in Terzan 5, but also provides evidence for two more recent rounds of star formation.

As a result, researchers have reclassified Terzan 5 as a bulge fossil fragment or BFF. These findings were made possible by data from two of our most powerful observatories—the James Webb and Hubble space telescopes.

Although this system is located within the crowded bulge of our Milky Way galaxy and began forming its first stars 12 billion years ago, Terzan 5 was massive enough to maintain its separate identity—while other, lighter-weight star systems spread out and mixed to form the bulge, or core of our galaxy, billions of years ago. Terzan 5 is like a lump in an otherwise well-mixed cake batter.

Terzan 5’s first generation of stars formed roughly 12 billion years ago—as the Milky Way itself was assembling—and another about 4.7 billion years ago, just before the Earth started forming. The third generation formed 3.8 billion years ago and the fourth only 2.5 billion years ago.

HiPOD: Fan and Ridges in Southern Gale Crater

Our objective with this observation is to study a setting of complex fan and ridge systems in southern Gale Crater. HiRISE stereo was also requested to investigate their stratigraphy and geologic evolution. This footprint is almost directly southeast of the Curiosity rover, close to the base of Aeolis Mons (Mount Sharp).

ID: ESP_077088_1745 date: 6 January 2023 altitude: 266 km