#and the galaxy at large

[the-wolf-and-moon]

Within the LMC Galaxy

[inefekt]

Milky Way at York, Western Australia

Nikon d810a - 50mm - ISO 6400 - f/2.5 - Foreground: 7 x 30 seconds - Sky: 35 x 30 seconds - iOptron SkyTracker - Hoya Red Intensifier filter

[tubbytarchia]

Also, Yugioh (Zexal) art I haven't posted on here before since it's effectively lost/unavailable otherwise. And I don't like that

[spacetelescopescience]

Hubble witnessed a dwarf galaxy crashing through the Milky Way galaxy’s gaseous halo and living to tell the tale … though a bit worse for wear! https://bit.ly/3YCVcUE

[reegis]

uhm.,,. doodle of lyf/marius/brian :33 prophet boyfriends rent free in my brain

they are making breakfast 🍳♥️

[cosmica-galaxy]

I am projecting on my favorite unit. OG meme

[ahsoka-in-a-hood]

It is my unshakable headcanon that somewhere hidden deep in wildspace is a place where a small collection of jedi survivors and clone escapees protect and raise and teach a collection of force sensitive children sent to them on the path and tubies absconded from kamino before it shut down and they thrived

[seeking-elsewhither]

haha you know what if Omega slowly unpacks the trauma of being Nala Se's medical assistant to the Batch someday but out of everything she went through, the only thing that really upsets her is how tubie Hunter, Crosshair, Tech and Wrecker were treated

[livingforstars]

The Large Cloud of Magellan (LMC) - October 23rd, 1996.

"Magellan and his crew had plenty of time to study the southern sky during their famous voyage around the world. As a result, two fuzzy cloud like objects in the southern sky are now known as the Clouds of Magellan. These star clouds are small irregular galaxies, satellites of our larger Milky Way spiral galaxy. The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) pictured above is only about 180,000 light-years distant - the only known galaxy closer is the Sagittarius Dwarf. Both the LMC and the Small Magellanic Clouds (SMC) are joined to the Milky Way by a stream of cold hydrogen gas. An unusual effect called gravitational lensing was detected in a few LMC stars, and there was hope that this could tell us important information about the true composition of our Universe."

[phoenixcatch7]

Security breach's story (including ruin) was super weird, right? Left a lot unexplained, introduced a lot of confusing elements, cleared nothing up, and made it worse with the ending of ruin. Very frustrating.

But.

I have a bold claim - in this essay I'm going to tell you that I think I've found the unifying theory of security breach, INCLUDING ruin. And no, it's nothing that's mentioned in the actual game.

It's 'Remnant'.

Now presumably matpat or some other theorist has made more detailed connections and I just haven't been able to find it, and I'm a casual fan at best lol. But I'm quite chuffed, so. I'm sharing.

Remnant is basically glowing soul juice produced by high emotions - children, trauma, excitement, suffering, death. Ectoplasm, essentially. It gets into physical objects and stores that emotion, like how a stuffed teddy is full of love or a torture device is full of pain. Yay!

Afton, during his killing spree, harvested this remnant from kids to fuel his plan for immortality (or something). He discovered along the way that if it was infused into a material like metal, then it could be shaped and, when combined with any form of intelligence ('even ai', he says!) it acts as a source of independent power 'that translates into movement, which is why things may appear haunted'. Ergo, animatronics. His perfect army of golems and test subjects.

The first round was, of course, fnaf 1, with the children literally stuffed into the suits to power them, which, yikes, horrible, and in a food establishment? Later he figured out how to skip the rotting corpse step and directly infuse metal, which made it temperature volatile and apparently hard to store. Anything is better than the first round. This resulted in sister location with the scooper, which could (as best I figure?) take the remnant out directly and store it for later use. It could also recycle animatronics, to scrap them without wasting all that precious soul juice that could theoretically power something forever.

Anyway, decades later, the same company is still running, and their precious 'animatronics' are now full on artificially intelligent robots with an army of drone cleaners and a dozen well covered up missing children.

You see where I'm going with this?

I think the glam rock animatronics are crafted out of the newest, highest grade remnant metal to bring them to life (maybe a little too much)... and to aid in the gathering of remnant to power Trap/afton, in his little recharge pod under the earth, at vannys direction. (And presumably all that after hour neon lighting, let's be real.)

The animatronics are all secretly equipped with track and destroy technology - roxy with her sensitive ears and x-ray eyes, chica with her stunlock voice box, monty with his metal rending claws and pouncing ability... Freddy with his chest cavity big enough to fit a small child. Like old times!

I swear the daycare attendant has infrared vision and very possibly direct access to the cctv, but anyway. (I also swear freddy collapsing on stage and triggering the safety protocol after hours was the only thing keeping him from joining, even leading the pack of machines to comb the place and take Gregory down to the scooper by trick or by stick, and Gregory almost made a fatal decision when he hid in the chest cavity. No freddy has ever been nice after hours, and there's no reason given why this one is.)

Back to the DA, it gives the implications of their old power core (freddys original upgrade and heavily theorised to have previously belonged to the only 'tronic out during the hourly recharge) a whole new meaning. Perhaps the setting of the daycare and all that happy sugar high children energy making happy memories was a perfect environment for a low level (experimental? Inefficient?) sort of... Emotional photosynthesis? It would explain why one half is the daycare and the other is the security patrol. Food for thought. Obviously freddy isn't able to receive all those benefits for a number of reasons.

(And it might explain the poor treatment of the DA, too, if the core was removed for some reason, and why sun is struggling so hard to keep his hopes up if it can no longer absorb and process literal happiness vibes for the best haunting ever. Poor guy always gets the short end of the stick. Maybe it also explains why the DA is the only animatronic to glow... because of the remnant metal? The extra juice they were supposed to have?)

Yeah, but what about ruin? How does it fit into this?

Well, for one, the new scooper. It's the literal gathering tool and storage place for all this remnant, so it's presumably pretty vital. Afton is parked directly above it in a recharge pod, sucking up all that sweet sweet juice. He's literally drinking children's tears, the monster.

And the mimic. Because there's a second part to remnant that only becomes relevant now. It's the worst and strongest emotion that can only be created through immense pain and suffering. 'Agony'. A black sludge of distilled horrors. And the thing is, it's highly infectious. But agony is useless. Unless it's combined with remnant in a specific way, and the resulting reaction is extremely powerful and dangerous.

The mimic is infected with agony. And it's found itself probably the biggest source of remnant in the world. The battery of (potentially) the whole pizza plex, and every animatronic inside it. (Moon may well have been the first infected... If the patrol animatronic encountered the mimic on its arrival. Ooh, now there's a thought. It's more likely it saw and tried to stop vanny from some unethical activity (it's a purely robot job!) And she... Prevented it from becoming a recurring issue with the glitch code. Ah, but there's no proof.)

Either all that remnant is now corrupted, or converted. My money is not on converted because the mimic is not spreading a plague of suffering across the land, and is instead trying to lure kids in again to replenish the remnant. And the poor animatronics are still clinging to blackened, crippled life.

It certainly would explain why the company just dropped the entire location without either bulldozing it to the ground or trying to scavenge and repair. With the animatronics infected with agony, it's far too dangerous to do either, and of course officials absolutely cannot find out.

TLDR: I think the missing puzzle piece is 'Remnant' to explain aftons presence, the strangely alive animatronics, the point of all those child disappearances Gregory was supposed to be investigating, the scooper, the mimic, vannys actual job as head enabler for afton, the animatronic's violent upgrades, the true goal of the pizza plex and why it was built over the sinkhole, but most importantly... how they're footing that electricity bill.

But hey ;D! That's just a theory!

[the-wolf-and-moon]

Large Magellanic Cloud

[theofficialastronomy101]

New telescope near completion, we’re so happy!

[thepastisalreadywritten]

WASHINGTON, Jan 29 (Reuters) — A batch of newly released images captured by the James Webb Space Telescope show in remarkable detail 19 spiral galaxies residing relatively near our Milky Way, offering new clues on star formation as well as galactic structure and evolution.

The images were made public on Monday by a team of scientists involved in a project called Physics at High Angular resolution in Nearby GalaxieS (PHANGS) that operates across several major astronomical observatories.

The closest of the 19 galaxies is called NGC5068, about 15 million light years from Earth, and the most distant of them is NGC1365, about 60 million light years from Earth.

A light year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km).

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was launched in 2021 and began collecting data in 2022, reshaping the understanding of the early universe while taking wondrous pictures of the cosmos.

The orbiting observatory looks at the universe mainly in the infrared.

The Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990 and still operational, has examined it primarily at optical and ultraviolet wavelengths.

Spiral galaxies, resembling enormous pinwheels, are a common galaxy type. Our Milky Way is one.

The new observations came from Webb's Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI).

They show roughly 100,000 star clusters and millions or perhaps billions of individual stars.

"These data are important as they give us a new view on the earliest phase of star formation," said University of Oxford astronomer Thomas Williams, who led the team's data processing on the images.

"Stars are born deep within dusty clouds that completely block out the light at visible wavelengths - what the Hubble Space Telescope is sensitive to - but these clouds light up at the JWST wavelengths.

We don't know a lot about this phase, not even really how long it lasts, and so these data will be vital for understanding how stars in galaxies start their lives," Williams added.

About half of spiral galaxies have a straight structure, called a bar, coming out from the galactic center to which the spiral arms are attached.

"The commonly held thought is that galaxies form from the inside-out, and so get bigger and bigger over their lifetimes.

The spiral arms act to sweep up the gas that will form into stars, and the bars act to funnel that same gas in towards the central black hole of the galaxy," Williams said.

The images let scientists for the first time resolve the structure of the clouds of dust and gas from which stars and planets form at a high level of detail in galaxies beyond the Large Magellanic Cloud and Small Magellanic Cloud, two galaxies considered galactic satellites of the sprawling Milky Way.

"The images are not only aesthetically stunning, they also tell a story about the cycle of star formation and feedback, which is the energy and momentum released by young stars into the space between stars," said astronomer Janice Lee of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, principal investigator for the new data.

"It actually looks like there was explosive activity and clearing of the dust and gas on both cluster and kiloparsec (roughly 3,000 light years) scales.

The dynamic process of the overall star formation cycle becomes obvious and qualitatively accessible, even for the public, which makes the images compelling on many different levels," Lee added.

Webb's observations build on Hubble's.

"Using Hubble, we would see the starlight from galaxies, but some of the light was blocked by the dust of galaxies," University of Alberta astronomer Erik Rosolowsky said.

"This limitation made it hard to understand parts of how a galaxy operates as a system. With Webb's view in the infrared, we can see through this dust to see stars behind and within the enshrouding dust."

[quiltofstars]

The Tarantula Nebula, C103 (lower right) // Pratastrocat

Zoomed out, the Tarantula Nebula dominates the view of the Large Magellanic Cloud. Rich in gas and dust, the LMC is currently undergoing vigorous star formation. American astronomer Robert Burnham Jr. (1931-1993) calls the LMC an "astronomical treasure-house, a great celestial laboratory for the study of the growth and evolution of the stars."

[lord-squiggletits]

If any MegOP writers are hungry for an Orion Pax who gushes over Megatron and is obsessed with him and looks at him with stars in his eyes, might I suggest giving IDW1 OP/IDW1 MegOP a try?

[intuitive-revelations]

One major implication I don't think that episode really took the time to settle on is the implication that the Toymaker has already massively messed up the universe?

Toymaker: I came to this universe with such delight. And I played them all, Doctor. I toyed with supernovas, turned galaxies into spin tops. I gambled with God and made him a jack-in-the-box. Toymaker: I made a jigsaw out of your history... did you like it? Toymaker: The Master was dying and begged for his life with one final game, and when he lost, I sealed him for all eternity within my gold tooth.

And later:

Toymaker: Do you think a grand total of two can cause me to shiver when I've played against the Guardians of Time and Space and shrank them into voodoo dolls?

So to summarise:

It's implied the universe is now even more destroyed by the Toymaker's reality warping. Granted we don't know what the scale of this is, unlike the Flux, but it's possibly proportionally quite big considering how little of the universe is left already? That being said, he could have done this in history before the Flux, since it was a linear event, in which case this is far less of an issue.

That being said, it's likely this was reversed by the Toymaker being banished - so we're probably not going to see galaxy-sized spin-tops in the future. How many people died, and if they come back however, is less clear.

The Master (presumably dying after POTD), and the Black and White Guardians (at least - possibly the other 3 guardians too, excluding the Toymaker - though they're the main ones, and it's "order and chaos" specifically which are mentioned in the episode) have all gamed with the Toymaker and lost. The tooth!Master is at least left in our universe, and may possibly be secure with UNIT. The fate of the Guardians is a bit less clear, as is the implications for the balance of the universe.

But perhaps the biggest thing, and the one the episode actually took the time to give us a confused 14 reaction shot to:

The Toymaker has a made a 'jigsaw' out of the Doctor's history (or maybe history in general, although he does say 'your').

So what does that mean?

The hint is that the Doctor has already experienced whatever it is... so what was it that he caused with his interference?

To me there's perhaps three possible options:

The Star Beast - this would be an oddly minor thing to refer to, but arguably makes the most sense in the 'arc' of the specials. Perhaps he's referring to the Doctor encountering Beep the Meep for the first time again? ie. taken one jigsaw piece and exchanged its position in his timeline. For now this might be my headcanon regarding it, but would be really odd to be the intention, especially since we're already disregarding most of the other appearances of the Toymaker in the EU? It's also of course not the first time we've had an adaptation of an EU story in the main show without referencing the original (the no. 1 example being Human Nature - there are others like The Lodger and Dalek, but they're different enough that they can co-exist in a continuity with their source material).

The Timeless Child / Fugitive Doctor - RTD has said he's not going retcon the arc, but this arguably makes the most sense as a 'puzzle' being made out of the Doctor's history? Especially with regards to the Fugitive Doctor anyway, given there's the additional complications of her a) being the "Doctor", b) having a Police Box TARDIS, yet c) seemingly being from around the time of the Anchoring of the Thread.

The Toymaker's being time-wimey, it hasn't happened yet / it's nothing in particular - While it would be a bit confusing to contradict the one detail we got in the episode, this is always a possibility too. After all, there was a lot of sequel hooking all across these specials, so it might be something RTD will come back to, especially if we are going to be seeing more of the past Doctors in future series? Hopefully not by the biregeneration theory he gave about them all being split retroactively, because that is literally insane and doesn't even make the little sense the 14-15 one does....wtf.

So overall, what do I think?

Well I think I can be somewhat forgiving with the damage to the rest of the universe, just because it's implied that it might be reset, and the scale/lethality was never established. Plus like I said, there is some justification to the proportional issue not being too bad when combined with the Flux.

The Black and White Guardians implication is... interesting. We are gradually building up more and more of those 'Great Old One' / pre-universe elements in (New)NewWho, so there's a good chance this could come back in the future. It probably won't have immediate effects on the universe, as the Guardians seemed to be more concerned with specific dangers like the Key to Time. It could perhaps lead to more Eternals popping up across the universe, given the Guardians were the only force they really answered to. RTD I think is also quite aware of some of the Eternal-type lore too, since he played around with it quite a bit in those Series 1 articles talking about the Time War.

The Master's obviously coming back and as silly as this was, it does at least justify him being alive after POTD. It actually opens up the possibility of seeing Dhawan himself again too, which would be great! The nail-polished hand picking it up felt like a bit of a trolling moment, after how underwelming all the theories of who did it were when the End of Time came along. Someone pointed out that Kate actually has the same nail-polish, which would be interesting. Perhaps when we next see the Master, they'll be in UNIT captivity, Delgado style?

Finally, the jigsaw line, which is possibly the most interesting. Originally I was going to lean towards this being nothing / a vague setup for future past-Doctor stuff, since that seems to be the default, but now that I've laid it out... I think this could be a setup for more Fugitive!Doctor appearances. It makes the most sense from a story perspective anyway, given what the Toymaker said and some of the questions surrounding her not being answered, whether or not it's the direction the franchise would actually want to go.

After all, as controversial as the Timeless Child lore was, as far as I'm aware Jo Martin was pretty well recieved, and I'm sure RTD would love to look for opportunities to do more with her somehow. Whether he'd want something so continuity dependent from a showrunning perspective, however, is a bit more questionable.