Haha, this is great! The authors simulate the future trajectory of the interplanetary Tesla roadster and conclude "we estimate the probability of a collision with Earth and Venus over the next one million years to be 6% and 2.5%, respectively. We estimate the dynamical lifetime of the Tesla to be a few tens of millions of years."

A complication is that the space-car will make a close pass by Earth in 2091, which makes its orbital path hard to extrapolate accurately past that point.

h/t +Christopher De Vries

Great article about the size of moons of the minor bodies in our solar system. Cool details: 1) the animation that shows Pluto and Charon co-orbiting, 2) it's easy to forget that mass generally goes as the cube of size - the Moon is 25% of Earth diameter but only about 1% of Earth's mass, 3) the mocked up graphic of relative sizes of the moons of Pluto, Eris and Orcus is cool, 4) the fact that Eris is nearly the same size as Pluto justifies (in my opionion) the demotion of Pluto from planet status.

These new pictures of Jupiter are AMAZING! The intricacy of the storm vortices is mesmerizing.

It's easy to forget that our view of the Moon with all of the maria is special. The far side of the moon is much plainer looking.

More info: https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap130916.html

Many of you will not agree with me, but I think this is one of +Ethan Siegel 's best articles ever. He covers so many important concepts in one short article. The binding-energy-per-nucleon flatness is something I never realized before, it it explains so well why everything isn't just iron. Also, the idea that the silicon-fusion phase is so short (mere hours before supernova after a million-year buildup!) is mind-blowing.

The excellent charts in this blog post capture the most surprising feature of the total solar eclipse last week. We sense light logarithmically, so it didn't seem to get really dark until the last moments of the eclipse.

Based on these new occultation observations, team members say MU69 may not be not a lone spherical object, but suspect it could be an “extreme prolate spheroid” – think of a skinny football – or even a binary pair. The odd shape has scientists thinking two bodies may be orbiting very close together or even touching – what’s known as a close or contact binary – or perhaps they’re observing a single body with a large chunk taken out of it. The size of MU69 or its components also can be determined from these data. It appears to be no more than 20 miles (30 kilometers) long, or, if a binary, each about 9-12 miles (15-20 kilometers) in diameter.

h/t John Nolan

This is indeed surprising. And it makes any understanding of human biology via genetic analysis so much more complicated.