George Bendo
George's Random Astronomical Object
George's Random Astronomical Object is a biweekly astronomy podcast featuring science discussions about astronomical objects at randomly selected locations in the sky. The wide range of topics discussed in the show include stars, variable stars, variable variable stars, supermassive black holes, ultracool dwarf stars, exoplanets, howler monkeys, infrared radiation, acronyms, more acronyms, starbursts, measurements of less than 12 parsecs, jellyfish galaxies, diffuse ionized gas, and general overall weirdness.
Author
George Bendo
Category
Podcast website
Latest episode
Jun 22, 2026
Where to listen?
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Episodes
Object 103: The Pulsar within the Cosmic Hand 24.07.2023 8:35
PSR B1509-58 is a relatively young pulsar that sits within a supernova remnant that looks like a giant hand.
Object 102: Another Ring Thing 10.07.2023 7:14
The spiral galaxy NGC 7552 is best known for its relatively small but bright starburst ring.
Object 101: Warm and Cold 26.06.2023 11:48
The star Eta Corvi is surrounded by a disk of dust with a rather complex structure and rather complex origin.
Object 100: The Self-Descriptive Nebula 12.06.2023 13:52
The Taurus Molecular Cloud is exactly what it sounds like it is, a cloud made of mulecular gas (mostly molecular hydrogen) in the constellation Taurus, but it is also much more than that.
Object 99: No References to the Six Wives of Henry VIII 27.05.2023 9:41
Abell 514 is a cluster of galaxies that contains six radio galaxies, and the polarized radio emission from those six radio galaxies can be used to probe the magnetic fields within the cluster.
Object 98: Double the Black Holes for Double the Fun 15.05.2023 11:50
Markarian 266 is a pair of merging galaxies that now contains two supermassive black holes.
Object 97: A Runaway Cow 01.05.2023 11:24
Mu Columbae is a bright, blue star that was ejected from the Orion Nebula in a complex gravitational interaction involving three other stars.
Object 96: The Proof-Of-Concept Exoplanet 17.04.2023 11:29
WASP-1 was the first star identified as having an exoplanet by the Wide Angle Search for Planets and thus helped to validate the techniques used by that survey.
Object 95: Two Non-Archaeological Relics 03.04.2023 8:06
The cluster Abell 168 formed from the merger of two smaller clusters, and this had many weird effects on the intracluster gas between the galaxies.
Object 94: So Hot and So Small 20.03.2023 8:22
WD 2211-495 is a small, hot white dwarf with a rather unusual amount of heavy elements in its outer atmosphere, implying that something from a surrounding planetary system occasionally falls into the star.
Object 93: Superthin 07.03.2023 9:05
UGC 7321 is an unusually flat (or superthin) spiral galaxy, which is indicative of how it has avoided gravitational interactions with other galaxies that could alter its shape.
Object 92: Look at This Elliptical Galaxy Instead 20.02.2023 11:43
The elliptical galaxy contains an abnormal amount of interstellar dust with no accompanying interstellar gas, which is weird.
Object 91: The Second Air Pump Galaxy 06.02.2023 11:26
Antlia 2, which was recently found orbiting the Milky Way, is the most diffuse galaxy that anyone has ever discovered up to this point in time.
Object 90: The Globular Cluster in a Forest Fire 23.01.2023 9:17
UKS 1 probably lies on the far side of the Milky Way, and the light from the cluster is heavily obscured by interstellar dust, but even though it's hard to see, astronomers are still really interested in it.
Object 89: Relationship Status - It's Complicated 09.01.2023 8:57
R Aquarii could be described as one of the closest symbiotic binary star systems to Earth, but it's more complicated than that.
Object 88: Some Sort of Weird, Ultraviolet Freak of Nature 26.12.2022 11:30
NGC 6052 looks like a spiral galaxy smashing into a wall of stars, which is more or less what is actually happening.
Object 87: The Fake Sphere 28.11.2022 9:31
Although at first NGC 6781 may look like a spherical planetary nebula, it actually has a cylindrical shape, which has rather complex scientific implications for analyzing this object.
Object 86: Two Hellscapes Orbiting a Red Dwarf 14.11.2022 12:44
The red dwarf HD 260655 has two large, hot, rocky planets orbiting very close to it.
Object 85: The Swedish Stellar Superstore 31.10.2022 12:05
As the largest open cluster that anyone has found in the Milky Way, Westerlund 1 contains a lot of rare and weird stars.
Object 84: Eccentricity 17.10.2022 9:08
The evolved red star HD 214362 is orbiting the center of the Milky Way in a very eccentric way (as in either its orbit is a very elongated ellipse or its orbit is just plainly strange).
Object 83: Number 1 in 1970 03.10.2022 13:58
In 1970, the quasar 4C 05.34 was the most distant known object in the universe, but this is not the only interesting fact about this object.
Object 82: Officially Peculiar 19.09.2022 9:17
A large mass of gas fell into the lenticular galaxy NGC 3593 about 2 billion years ago, and this gas both changed the appearance of the galaxy and also created new stars that now orbit the galaxy in the opposite direction from the older stars.
Object 81: Unusually Shocking 05.09.2022 9:50
What may be most interesting about the pulsar PSR J2124-3358 is not that it is spinning very rapidly but that stellar winds from the pulsar have collided with the interstellar medium, producing a glowing bow shock.
Object 80: The Confusing and Controversial Names Episode 22.08.2022 10:47
The star WR 124 (also called Merrill's Star, although that name ignores two of the people involved in the discovery) is a really hot Wolf-Rayet star that has produced the surrounding nebula M1-67 (which has no relation to Messier 1) and that is hurling through the Milky Way in an unusual direction at an unusual speed.
Object 79: The Magic of Circumstellar Semantics 08.08.2022 11:39
The star HD 131835 had a circumstellar disk of dust and gas that technically is neither a debris disk nor a protoplanetary disk but instead some sort of weird hybrid of these two things.
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