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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 20 parsecs, jellyfish galaxies, diffuse ionized gas, and general ...
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 star.By George Bendo
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.By George Bendo
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Object 92: Look at This Elliptical Galaxy Instead
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11:43
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The elliptical galaxy contains an abnormal amount of interstellar dust with no accompanying interstellar gas, which is weird.By George Bendo
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.By George Bendo
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Object 90: The Globular Cluster in a Forest Fire
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9:17
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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 interested in it.By George Bendo
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Object 89: Relationship Status - It's Complicated
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8:57
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R Aquarii could be described as one of the closest symbiotic binary star systems to Earth, but it's more complicated than that.By George Bendo
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Object 88: Some Sort of Weird, Ultraviolet Freak of Nature
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11:30
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11:30
NGC 6052 looks like a spiral galaxy smashing into a wall of stars, which is more or less what is actually happening.By George Bendo
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.By George Bendo
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Object 86: Two Hellscapes Orbiting a Red Dwarf
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12:44
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12:44
The red dwarf HD 260655 has two large, hot, rocky planets orbiting very close to it.By George Bendo
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Object 85: The Swedish Stellar Superstore
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12:05
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As the largest open cluster that anyone has found in the Milky Way, Westerlund 1 contains a lot of rare and weird stars.By George Bendo
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).By George Bendo
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.By George Bendo
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 the opposite direction from the older stars.By George Bendo
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 glowing bow shock.By George Bendo
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Object 80: The Confusing and Controversial Names Episode
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10:47
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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 (which has no relation to Messier 1) and that is hurling through the Milky Way in an unusual direction at an unusual speed.…
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Object 79: The Magic of Circumstellar Semantics
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11:39
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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.By George Bendo
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Object 78: A Dwarf Galaxy with Something for Everyone
12:03
12:03
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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 object as well.By George Bendo
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Object 77: Another 90's Gamma Ray Flashback
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10:30
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GRB 980326 was the first gamma ray burst to be associated with a supernova, which was truly groundbreaking even if the astronomers who discovered it were probably using Netscape at the time.By George Bendo
Sakurai's Object was discovered in 1996 by the amateur astronomer Yukio Sakurai, who had been searching for comets but who had instead found a dying star that had brifly undergone a final burst of fusion, causing it to increase dramatically in brightness.By George Bendo
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Object 75: The Completely Unconcerned Open Cluster
9:31
9:31
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The open cluster NGC 3680 is 1.4 billion years old, making it unusually long-lived for such a cluster.By George Bendo
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Object 74: The Brightest Star on the Argo
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12:33
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As the second brightest star in the night sky, Canopus is associated with many different myths, yet as the closest yellow supergiant to Earth, the star is also scientifically important.By George Bendo
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Object 73: A Very Distant Infrared Smudge
14:04
14:04
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The hyperluminous infrared galaxy IRAS 10214+4724 was the most distant infrared object seen by astronomers in the 1980s.By George Bendo
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Object 72: No Face Masks Are Needed for Monocerotis
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8:43
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GX Monocerotis is a evolved star near the end of its life that is expelling its outer gas layers, and because the star is in orbit in a binary star system, those gas layers have formed a spiral pattern.By George Bendo
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Object 71: The Black Hole That Didn't Get Its Morning Coffee
9:07
9:07
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The center of the barred spiral galaxy Messier 71 contains multiple regions where stars are forming as well as an inactive supermassive black home that needs some caffeine.By George Bendo
Eta Aquilae was the first Cepheid variable ever discovered, but this class of stars was named after Delta Cephei instead.By George Bendo
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Object 69: How To Avoid Photobombing Asteroids
11:15
11:15
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11:15
The North Ecliptical Pole points to a location perpendicular to the plane of the Solar System, which makes it a unique place for certain types of astronomical observations.By George Bendo
The spiral galaxy NGC 6814 is a source of strong but variable X-ray emission that astronomers are using to measure the mass of a supermassive black hole at its center.By George Bendo
The abnormal-looking globular cluster Messier 71 is unusual in that its stars contain an excessive amount of heavy elements and in that it is being gravitationally shredded by the Milky Way.By George Bendo
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Object 66: This Episode Brought to You by the Letter B
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14:38
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The binary star system b Centauri contains an exoplanet named b Centauri b that, despite its confusing name, has changed astronomers' perspectives on how and where planets can form.By George Bendo
Even though HD 106252 has an exoplanet orbiting it, astronomers are much more interested in the fact that HD 106252 looks very similar to the Sun.By George Bendo
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Object 64: An Actual Use for Einstein's Famous Equation
11:44
11:44
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11:44
VER J0521+211 is a distant galaxy that produces gamma rays with such high energy that, when the gamma rays hit the Earth's atmosphere, the photons transform into electrons and positrons.By George Bendo
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Object 63: A Rant About Variable Star Classifications
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9:49
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UX Ari is an RS CVn type variable star system, which is a confusing way to classify variable star systems but which means that UX Ari contains two stars very close together with complex, interacting magnetic fields that produce all sorts of weird effects.By George Bendo
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Object 62: Imaged Before the Hubble Space Telescope Was Fixed
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NGC 7457 was one of the first things imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope, which meant that the images of it were relatively blurry, but this is not the most interesting fact about this lenticular galaxy.By George Bendo
SPT-CL J0546-5345 is an abnormally large cluster that formed very quickly after the Big Bang, which places some strong constraints of models of the formation and evolution of the universe.By George Bendo
UM 425 could be either a pair of very similar quasars at the same distance from Earth or a single quasar that has been gravitationally lensed so that it appears twice in the sky.By George Bendo
VW Cephei is an eclipsing binary star system containing two stars that are so close that they share an outer gas layer.By George Bendo
Chi Cygni is a Mira-type variable star with some of the most extreme variations in brightness among any variable stars in the sky.By George Bendo
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Object 57: One of 57 Varieties of Active Galactic Nuclei
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12:45
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3C 147 is not the first object ever identified as a quasar, but it is sort of one of the first two objects ever called a quasar.By George Bendo
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Object 56: The Next Best Thing to an Exoplanet
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9:52
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Astronomers may not have found an exoplanet orbiting the star HD 191089, but they found the next best thing.By George Bendo
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Object 55: The Quiet Kid on the Edge of the Playground
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9:57
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The WLM Galaxy is located at the edge of the Local Group where it is relatively unaffected by everything happening around the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy.By George Bendo
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Object 54: Build Your Own Hypothesis At Home
10:42
10:42
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Jets of gas that are several light years long are emerging from the blue supergiant MWC 137, and no one knows why.By George Bendo
Most globular clusters are among the first stars to form in the universe, but the globular cluster NGC 6352 seems abnormally young in comparison.By George Bendo
It took 10 years of observations for astronomers to determine that the star HD 154345 had a Jupiter-like exoplanet orbiting it.By George Bendo
While the gamma ray burst GRB 090926A itself might be interesting to some astronomers (particularly desperate gamma ray astronomers), the interstellar gas between the burst and Earth may be even more interesting.By George Bendo
IC 10 is a nearby starburst, a type of galaxy that is forming stars at a very high rate (for its size) that should not be confused with the fruit flavored candy.By George Bendo
The cluster of galaxies Abell S1063 was only reported as a discovery in the 1980s, but it has attracted a lof of attention because of how it gravitationally distorts the light of galaxies behind it.By George Bendo
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Object 48: It's Too Obvious To Say It's Complex
9:50
9:50
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The S254-S258 Complex is a chain of ionized gas bubbles connected by a filament of cold interstellar gas and dust where star are forming in a complicated (or possibly complex) way.By George Bendo
NGC 3504 contains three rings, two bars, and a supermassive black hole but no locations licensed to sell alcohol (as far as astronomers know).By George Bendo
An exoplanet has managed to stay in a stable orbit around LX Serpentis despite the fact that it is a cataclysmic binary star system with a chaotic past.By George Bendo
Markarian 590 contains an active galactic nucleus with a supermassive black hole, and the region around the black hole has strangely changed in brightness a couple of times in the past 50 years.By George Bendo
