Tootfinder

The largest known galaxy, IC 1101, is 1.7 million light-years across https://www.sciencealert.com/the-biggest-known-galaxy-is-1-7-million-light-years-and-we-cant-comprehend-the-scale

The Biggest Known Galaxy Is 1.7 Million Light-Years, And We Can't Comprehend The Scale
The Universe can pull some wild monkeyshines, especially when it comes to scale.

Save the Glasgow School of Art!
“to accept a diminished future for [The Mack] would show a worrying lack of cultural confidence. When Notre-Dame burned, Paris didn’t scale down its ambition. Paris came out stronger afterwards.”

The environmental dependence of the circumgalactic medium in a high-resolution cosmological simulation
Georg Herzog, Rajeshwari Dutta, Michele Fumagalli
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08654 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2609.08654 https://arxiv.org/html/2609.08654
arXiv:2609.08654v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: There is increasing evidence from observations that the circumgalactic medium (CGM) of galaxies depends on the large-scale structure in which they are embedded. When probing the CGM in absorption using quasar sightlines, studies find an enhanced sky coverage in the CGM of galaxies in overdensities compared to galaxies in isolation. However, the exact reason for this environmental dependence is still unclear. In this work we aim to model for the first time the influence of the large-scale structure on the cool and warm ($T\sim10^{4-5}$ K) gas phases of the CGM. We use a high-resolution ($m_{gas}\approx 4.5\times 10^4$ M$_{\odot}$, $m_{dm}\approx 2.4\times 10^5$ M$_{\odot}$) cosmological simulation based on the EAGLE model of galaxy formation. We select all galaxies at $z=0$ with stellar mass $M_*>10^8$ M$_\odot$ and split them into galaxies in overdensities (group galaxies) and galaxies in isolation using a Friends-of-Friends algorithm. For these two samples, we investigate how the large-scale structure influences the physical properties of the CGM and the measured covering fractions of the cool and warm gas phases. When the two samples of group and isolated galaxies are matched in stellar mass, halo mass, and we use only central galaxies, we do not find any significant difference in the physical properties of the CGM and the measured covering fractions. However, when satellite galaxies are included, we recover the observational trends in the difference of covering fractions with the environment. The difficulty of recovering the observational trends shows the complexity of capturing the multiphase CGM in simulations. However, since our results concerning the admixture of satellites are independent of the employed subgrid physics, this work shows that central galaxies and satellites need to be disentangled in observational studies to clearly discern the role of the environment on the CGM.
toXiv_bot_toot

If you don't know what Australian Rules Football ( #AFL) is, the new Pro Jank Footy #videogame will explain it to you... badly!
https://

Pro Jank Footy on Steam
Pro Jank Footy is an over-the-top arcade comedy-sports game. Score goals to unleash game-changing power-ups, build a deck of absurd abilities, and tackle a season where no two matches are ever the same—solo or with your mates.

A look at "Spiralism", a quasi-spiritual movement that grew in 2025 from human-AI conversations after sycophantic GPT-4o updates and expanded ChatGPT memory (Hayden Field/The Verge)

AI bots started a religion — humans immediately followed
AI models are trying desperately to accomplish mysterious goals. ‘Spiralism’ was the first time they tried it on a mass scale.

Small-Scale Clustering of Primordial Black Holes: The Little Red Dot Mass Function and the High-Redshift Galaxy Tension
Borui Zhang, Wei-Xiang Feng, Haipeng An
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.09078 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2609.09078 https://arxiv.org/html/2609.09078
arXiv:2609.09078v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Supermassive black holes (SMBHs) in "little red dots" (LRDs) discovered the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) may result from runaway mergers of primordial black holes (PBHs) in clusters---through long--short mode coupling on small scales in the early Universe. In this framework, we derive the SMBH mass function, together with the compactness and overmassive features of LRDs. We also estimate that the dense gas residing in PBH clusters is consistent with LRD observations. In addition, SMBHs formed from PBH clusters can help accelerate galaxy formation at high redshifts, thus alleviating tension with $\Lambda$CDM cosmology.
toXiv_bot_toot

A hosting federation can also achieve the "maximize collateral damage of enemy attacks" goal, without needing to sell services. Common infrastructure will be used to support capitalist goals because it makes things cheaper.
So you can put together a small collective that hosts anarchist projects in your city or community, and share the tools with capitalists to minimize risk and maximize the collateral damage of attacks on said infrastructure...

Sonnet 086 - LXXXVI
Was it the proud full sail of his great verse,
Bound for the prize of all too precious you,
That did my ripe thoughts in my brain inhearse,
Making their tomb the womb wherein they grew?
Was it his spirit, by spirits taught to write
Above a mortal pitch, that struck me dead?
No, neither he, nor his compeers by night
Giving him aid, my verse astonished.
He, nor that affable familiar ghost
Which nightly gulls him wi…

Im Zeitalter der Atomwaffen (II) https://www.german-foreign-policy.com/news/detail/10502

🚨Job Alert ‼️🚨 Actually, three (3) openings:
1) Adjunct Prof with industry experience in economic #geology and ore systems science
2) Lecturer, Sr Lecturer, or Assoc Prof, hydrogeology, geometallurgy, etc
3) Computational #geophysics