Sky Candy in the Clouds

Let's start with a hat trick.

This is the Sombrero Galaxy, suspended a staggering 31 million light-years away from your screen.

800 billion stars captured in one frame.

There is a supermassive black hole weighing 9 billion solar masses in the center of this. pic.twitter.com/ZhVcGmaAdL

— Curiosity (@CuriosityonX) March 15, 2026

Astronomy Picture of the Day is always good.

My image of 'The Tadpoles of IC410' is today's NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day! Check it out here: https://t.co/P2AKwqasBL#Astrophotography pic.twitter.com/DLk8s7digm

— NebulaPhotos (@NebulaPhotos) March 17, 2026

Spiral galaxies always fascinate me. They look like the stars going down a drain into the black hole in the center, but that's an illusion — those stars are simply orbiting the galactic core. The bright arms are streams of new stars being created,

Hello Everyone, here is my latest capture. NGC 2903 is a bright, stunning barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Leo, often called the "Jewel of Leo". It's located about 25–30 million light-years away. I used my Celestron RASA telescope and ZWO ASI533MC color camera. pic.twitter.com/hvMBuVzmVw

— Chuck's Astrophotography (@chucksastropho1) March 18, 2026

Oddly, they tend to all orbit in the same direction, and the axes of rotation tend to point in the same direction. One explanation of this is that our universe is actually inside a black hole in our parent universe.

Shakedown cruise for my 6" f/9 Ritchey-Chretien telescope last night. Was able to get 5.25 hours on M81 in LRGB+Ha with an ASI533MM Pro camera. More info on Astrobin: https://t.co/m49mNAi0bV#astrophotography pic.twitter.com/35MizvMhyj

— 🔭 Dave phetches photons from aphar. (@PhotonPhanatic) March 19, 2026

This is called Schwarzschild cosmology.

The notion that our universe exists inside a black hole—often called black hole cosmology or Schwarzschild cosmology—proposes that what we perceive as the Big Bang and the entire observable cosmos is actually the interior of a black hole that formed in a larger “parent” universe. In standard general relativity, a black hole ends in a singularity, but models incorporating spacetime torsion (such as Einstein-Cartan gravity, developed by physicist Nikodem Popławski) predict that collapsing matter bounces instead of forming a singularity, birthing a new, expanding baby universe on the other side of the event horizon. Every black hole in our universe could therefore spawn its own child universe, creating a multiverse of nested realities. Our cosmic horizon matches the black hole’s event horizon, and the Big Bang corresponds to this “white hole” birth event. Because nearly all astrophysical black holes rotate (they are Kerr black holes), the parent black hole would impart overall angular momentum to its child universe, giving our cosmos a subtle global spin and a preferred rotational axis.

Recent JWST observations have been interpreted as supporting evidence for this rotating-universe scenario. In a 2025 analysis of the telescope’s Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES), astronomer Lior Shamir examined hundreds of early galaxies and found a striking asymmetry: roughly two-thirds rotate clockwise (the same direction as the Milky Way), while only one-third spin counterclockwise—far from the 50-50 random split expected in an isotropic cosmos. Popławski’s earlier theoretical work predicts exactly this effect: in a universe born inside a rotating black hole, the inherited spin axis becomes a preferred direction, and galaxies align their own angular momentum with it to minimize energy, producing the observed clockwise-counterclockwise imbalance. While alternative explanations exist, the finding has revived interest in the idea that our universe was “born rotating” inside a spinning parent black hole.

Making babies. Baby stars, at least.

"IC 410 is a silent cosmic cradle, where light is born from darkness. "

Captured with dual setups
SW Esprit 80 Ed, SW. 250mm
ASI1600MM Pro, ASI2600MC Pro

Credit：Larry Larry#ZWO #Astrophotography #Astronomy pic.twitter.com/hmWkzjk2Un

— ZWO (@zwoastro) March 18, 2026

Comets are cool. Have you ever seen one in real life? I saw Ikeya-Seki in 1965.

AstroBin's Image of the Day: "“Cosmic Wayfarer”—NGC3184 & Cmoet C/2025 A6" by Jiang Wuhttps://t.co/rvapZBwwfj#astrophotography pic.twitter.com/YulIsKTTRu

— AstroBin.com (@AstroBin_com) March 18, 2026

And a little OG Lovecraft.

AstroBin's Image of the Day: "CG 8–9–10 (BBW 56) — At the Mountains of Madness" by Charles Michaud - https://t.co/Mn0zBI40tU#astrophotography pic.twitter.com/ZqtiehKlTN

— AstroBin.com (@AstroBin_com) March 17, 2026

More clouds.

AstroBin's Image of the Day: "sh2-284" by Cédric Humbert - https://t.co/qGURJ3RHmM#astrophotography pic.twitter.com/7HTLEL4GB6

— AstroBin.com (@AstroBin_com) March 13, 2026

And more galaxies. To my eye, they look like they rotate in opposite directions, but Grok assures me that's an illusion.

The Arp 4 pair from the Hubble Space Telescope!

This is a pair of galaxies located in the constellation Cetus.

These galaxies appear to be close companions, but appearances are deceiving. The large blue galaxy, MCG-02-05-050, is located 65 million light-years from Earth, while… pic.twitter.com/I0cq4XhPNt

— Black Hole (@konstructivizm) March 19, 2026

And some space history.

Triumph turns to near disaster 60 years ago this morning

At 11:41 am March 16, 1966, rookie astronauts Neil Armstrong and David Scott launched aboard Gemini VIII. Within 6 hours, they had accomplished the first ever docking of two spacecraft in orbit. It was a milestone that the… pic.twitter.com/AKpaphcI3p

— NASA History Office (@NASAhistory) March 16, 2026

I remember this quite vividly and listening to Jules Bergman describing what happened and talking about it until they landed in the Pacific.

So that's it for this week. Comment, share, and come back next week for more Sky Candy.