Object 165: A Hole in the Clouds

Baade's Window is an unusual hole through the interstellar dust in the Milky Way's disk through which astronomers can very clearly see the stars near the center of our galaxy.

Markarian 231 is now widely recognized not only as the closest quasar to Earth but also as a very bright ultraluminous infrared galaxy.

The pulsar PSR J1022+1001 is one of a small subclass of pulsars named millisecond pulsars because they rotate one every few milliseconds.

The lenticular galaxy NGC 1172 contains two different populations of globular clusters, which indicates something about the history of the galaxy.

Dy Pegasi is an SX Phoenicis type variable star, and SX Phoenicis type variable stars are a subset of Delta Scuti type variable stars, and this episode explains why that is confusing but what it also actually means.

The spiral galaxy NGC 3718 has an unusually weird spiral shape, which belies its unusual history.

While amateur astronomers know that Albireo is a very spectacular-looking double star, professional astronomers are more interested in the dynamical complexities of Albireo's two star systems.

The gamma ray burst GRB 020819 took place in a galaxy containing so much light-obscuring interstellar dust that people initially misidentified which galaxy contained the burst.

The nearby Sun-like star HD 69830 may have three exoplanets orbiting it, but astronomers seem more focused on trying to understand a hard-to-explain dust disk in the star system.

Z Ursa Minor belongs to a class of variable stars that occasionally produce puffs of dust, but this is not the weeirdest thing about them.