fun factspopular science

unicorn day

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 :*

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