Explore every episode of the podcast George's Random Astronomical Object

Spica in the constellation Virgo is a well-studied binary star system that also ionizes the interstellar gas that surrounds it.

The Fourcade-Figueroa Galaxy is another example of a very flat disk galaxy seen edge-on from Earth, but that's not the only thing that makes this galaxy unusual.

The gravitationally lensed quasar SBS 1520+530 has been used in a unique way to measure the Hubble constant, but the derived value is rather low.

HD 210121 is a fairly ordinary blue star located behind a relatively thick cloud of interstellar gas and dust, providing astronomers with a unique opportinity to study that dust.

The Cepheus Flare is a nearby regions where a series of supernova explosions have counterintuitively triggered the formation of stars.

The red dwarf TOI-700 has at least four exoplanets orbiting it, and two of them are Earth-sized exoplanets lying within the star system's habitable zone.

G191-B2B is a hot white dwarf with a layer of nearly pure oxygen that has been used as a flux calibration source for one particularly famous telescope.

VY Canis Majoris is not only much, much larger than the Sun but is also ejecting blobs of gas that are forming molecules and dust.

3C 324 was once identified as a possible gravitational lens where one galaxy was bending the light from a galaxy behind it, but it turned out to be something different.

NGC 2639 may look like an ordinary spiral galaxy, but it contains an active galactic nucleus with jets of gas that have emerged from that nucleus in four different directions, which is, to use the technical term, quite weird.

LGS 3 (also known as the Pisces Dwarf Galaxy) is a nearby but faint dwarf galaxy that has provided some interesting clues as to how stars formed in the early universe.

While not many professional astronomers have spent much time looking at the open cluster Messier 103, it is still a spectacular object to see in an amateur astronomy telescope.

Astronomers have been studying the radiowave emission from the cluster of galaxies Abell 4038 quite intently and have provided both conventional and unconventional explanations for its origin.

The southern open cluster IC 2602, also known as the Theta Carinae Cluster or the Southern Pleiades, may not be as famous as some open clusters visible from the Northern Hemisphere, but it is still a good place for professional astronomers to study young stars, and it's also a good amateur astronomy target.

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.

The nearby face-on spiral galaxy Messier 101 is one of the most popular galaxies in the sky for astronomers to study, particularly in terms of studying the relative abundances of various elements within the galaxy.

A 0535+26 is a rather unusual star system called a Be high mass X-ray binary that periodically produces bursts of X-ray emission.

Hen 2-113 is a rather unusual planetary nebula that formed not when a Sun-like star died but when a large, massive, and extraordinarily hot Wolf-Rayet star blew away its outer hydrogen layers.

The quasar PKS 2126-158 has been popular to observe because astronomers can see many different things between the quasar and Earth, including an entire cluster of galaxies, that are absorbing light from the quasar.

Beta Ceti is a relatively close giant star where helium fusion has been triggered in its core, but it's a bit unusual compared to other stars that have reached this stage in their evolution.

Wolf 1069 is another nearby red dwarf with an exoplanet, but this time, the exoplanet is more likely to harbor life than other nearby red dwarfs with exoplanets that I may have discussed in previous episodes.

The globular cluster Messier 54 is not part of our galaxy but actually the nuclear stellar core of a dwarf galaxy that has nealy been completely gravitationally torn apart by the Milky Way.

DI Pegasi is a star system with two eclipsing stars in its center that orbit each other every 17 hours and 5 minutes and two smaller stars on very wide orbits that gravitationally tug on the central two stars, which has the effect that the variability of the star system's brightness seems to change over decades of time.

Abell 1142 is a peculiar cluster of galaxies that has formed from the merger of two smaller clusters, and its center contains nothing but gas.

SN 2002cx was the first supernova ever identified in a subclass of objects now called Type Iax supernovae.

PSR J1518+4904 is one of the very few identified double neutron stars, and it has provided opportunities to perform unique measurements on the objects.

The stars in the open cluster NGC 6253 contain abnormally large amounts of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, and no one is quite certain why.

GJ 887 is a very close red dwarf with two exoplanets (and a potential third) that almost look like they could harbor life except for one potential problem.

The awkwardly-named Segue 2 is (as of the time of the publication of this episode) the smallest galaxy anyone has ever found.

Messier 74 is just a very nice looking face-on spiral galaxy, which has made it quite useful for many different types of astrophysical analyses.

Infrared observations of SN 1995N indicate that the material ejected by the explosion may have produced a huge amount of dust.

The galaxy 3C 186 features a supermassive black hole with a mass several billions of times the mass of the Sun that has been ejected 36000 light years out of the galaxy's nucleus.

4U 1850-087 is an ultracompact binary star system consisting of a whtie dwarf and a neutron star orbiting each other so closely that the neutron star can strip the outer layers off of the white dwarf.

The elliptical galaxy NGC 4291 contains a supermassive black hole that is unusually massive in comparison to the rest of the galaxy.

HD 11397 is one of very few Sun-like stars that might seem ordinary but actually contain abnormally large amounts of heavy elements, most notably barium, that they could not have formed themselves.

NGC 3801 is one of the very few nearby galaxies where astronomers can see jets from an active galactic nucleus disrupting star formation in the galaxy in a process known as feedback.

The star at the center of the planetary nebula NGC 7094 is almost but not quite a white dwarf, making it a rather unusual object for astronomers to look at.

One of the spiral arms in the galaxy NGC 3110 is producing unusually huge amounts of new stars as well as unusually huge amounts of infrared emission.

The radio source PMN J0134-0931 created a lot of excitement in 2002 when people discovered that it was a quasar gravitationally lensed by another galaxy in front of it, they were really excited.

Hydrus I is a very small, ultrafaint dwarf galaxy orbiting the Milky Way that was accidentally (or, to use the technical term, serendipitously) found by the Dark Energy Survey.

NGC 4261 was made famous when Hubble Space Telescope observations in the 1990s showed that this elliptical galaxy contains a supermassive black hole.