If you had a rough day, here’s just a small reminder that today is the #UnicornDay.
Even though you may have stormed through it, you aren’t even a second late to celebrate.
I honor you with some extra star constellation knowledge, unicorn-shaped muffins (extra icing, please), and a mythological-themed movie or tv series.
Monoceros (Greek for unicorn) is a faint constellation near the celestial equator. Its name and definition are attributed to the 17th-century Dutch cartographer Petrus Plancius.
Even though Monoceros is not easily spotted with the naked eye in the night sky (because it contains only a few fourth magnitude stars) it has some pretty astonishing astro objects in it.
Plaskett’s Star for instance — a supermassive binary system whose combined mass is estimated to be almost like *one hundred* Suns put together.
Also, the nearest known black hole to our Solar System is in the Unicorn constellation (it’s roughly estimated to be 6.6 solar mass).
Monoceros contains two super-Earth exoplanets (extrasolar planets aka planets outside the Solar system): COROT-7b and COROT-7c. Both of these planets were discovered in 2009.
Some deep space objects within Monoceros are so nicely featured in the frames of today’s neuron’s post thanks to @stinkisar (Rosette Nebula, The Christmas Tree Cluster, Cone Nebula, NGC 2254, Hubble Variable Nebula, and IC 447).
And yes, space is divine. So are you :*