So, I have lots of saved stories, but first, watch this space.
Here's a better video showing the appearance of the new supernova. Each frame is a stack from ~2 hours of exposures captured through RGB filters to see it in color.
— Andrew McCarthy (@AJamesMcCarthy) September 6, 2026
I was lucky I was in the middle of a massive ~100 hour project with this galaxy- the final shot will be SO cool pic.twitter.com/Rph4vWAd9N
Certainly the biggest story is astronomy and space this week has been the successful launch of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. I ran a couple of great pictures in last week's Sunday Supplement, but I'm going to repeat this one, well, because I can, and it's cool.
Roman Silhouette. 👤
— Tyler Gray (@TylerG1998) August 31, 2026
In real-time, relive the moment where SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy and NASA’s Roman Space Telescope transited the solar disk during yesterday’s launch. @NASASpaceflight
📝 Mission recap: https://t.co/XCoHdJXpau pic.twitter.com/Z9W28xfCGM
The thing that makes the NGRST — I think that's going to be the common abbreviation, just like JWST is for the James Webb Space Telescope — special is that Hubble and JWST have very narrow fields of view. Roman can capture a whole full Moon; Hubble and JWST can capture just a tiny sliver.
Roman's camera covers 100× Hubble's sky area in a single exposure. In Year 1, it will catalog ~1 billion galaxies — more than all of human astronomy history combined. Gathering the same data with Hubble would take 500 years of uninterrupted observation. We built a machine to do…
— Peter H. Diamandis, MD (@PeterDiamandis) September 3, 2026
In 1955, Arthur C. Clarke published what is still one of my favorite novels of his, Earthlight, a spy story set around the Lunar Observatory. The supertelescope at the Lunar Observatory is an astounding 1,000 centimeters; that is 10 meters, or about 33 feet if you insist. The Keck Observatory telescope is 10 meters, and the next generation of telescopes will be much bigger. Of course, they will still be on Earth, so they will be limited by the atmosphere, but it's still interesting.
One of the most famous images from Hubble, even with its very narrow field of view, is the Hubble Ultra Deep Field.
A million-second exposure. 10,000 galaxies. One mind-blowing image.
— Hubble (@NASAHubble) March 9, 2023
The Hubble Ultra Deep Field image unveiled a powerful, deep view of our universe #OTD in 2004.
This image only covers the amount of sky you can see through an eight-foot-long soda straw: https://t.co/zaMJELUaJz pic.twitter.com/xbvxPFQPKn
Related: Sunday Supplement: Nancy Grace Roman Edition
When my father was a boy, astronomers thought the Milky Way was all there was. Every bright spot in that image — or nearly every spot, a random local star may have crept in — is a galaxy, and there are 10,000 of them.
“Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.”
From The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
That's not the only news. The dwarf planet Eris turns out to be quite a planet in its own right, bright and shiny with an albedo of between 0.96 and 0.99, or much brighter than new-fallen snow, while its moon Dysnomia is as dark as charcoal.
Eris is actually 25.7% heavier than Pluto.
— ToughSF (@ToughSf) September 5, 2026
It has a shiny white surface, while its moon Dysnomia, a quarter of its size, is very dark with an albedo of just 0.05.
This strange pair orbits between 38.1 and 97.49 AU from the Sun. pic.twitter.com/T9pLpaJVBJ
(I think they should have named it Cueball and Eightball.)
Before they were officially named, Eris was being called Xena, and the moon Gabrielle. With the official naming, they chose Eris, the goddess of discord, and Dysnomia, Eris's daughter and the personification of lawlessness.
Of course, Xena was played by Lucy Lawless, and the astronomers say that was on purpose. So there's a little Easter egg.
I'm a cat person — I'll tell you about my current cat Ginger, a/k/a Captain Chaos, and how I got him another time. But there is cat science in the news too.
Recently, we had the International Cat Day, and Science had a cover story.
The domestic cat may be a far more recent arrival to Europe than previously thought, according to a 2025 Science study.
— Science Magazine (@ScienceMagazine) August 8, 2026
The findings offer new insight into one of humanity’s most enigmatic animal companions and identify North Africa as the cradle of the modern housecat.
Learn… pic.twitter.com/93av1n7s9f
The late arrival in Europe may be a sign that humans were harder to domesticate than first thought.
To close out the Sunday Supplement for today, there's a new story about an interesting archaeological discovery in Britain.
On a modest hill in England, archaeologists discovered the greatest assemblage of prehistoric jewelry in Europe. The torcs, neck rings, are what’s truly phenomenal. Ancient Britons buried them, then stopped making them. Now, scholars want to know why.https://t.co/Y2yHuaxVzr pic.twitter.com/gnIMVulOEV
— Archaeology Magazine (@archaeologymag) August 7, 2026
The whole story is worth a read.
And I think that's it for this week. Come back on Friday for Sky Candy, and next Sunday for the Sunday Supplement. Be there or be a rhombus.
Oh, and don't miss the start of my new series on the whole data center controversy.
