To an embryologist, everything looks a bit eggy


This is a nice micrograph of an ascidian egg. A very large egg.

That is definitely the sperm entry point there in the lower half, so it’s apparently a freshly fertilized zygote at this point.

Wait, no, that’s not an egg! It’s Jupiter! I wonder when it will start to gastrulate? I don’t want to be around when it reaches the tadpole larva stage and starts swimming away.

There’s a whole series of Hubble images of the outer planets. Uranus and Neptune are rather blurry, but a very pretty robin’s egg blue, which means obviously that when they hatch they’re going to start screeching to be fed, which will be a bit terrifying, especially when their mama flies back to the solar system.

Comments

  1. Jason Nishiyama says

    The power of the human mind to classify and seek patterns based on it’s previous knowledge.

  2. says

    Everyone knows that gas giants hatch into disc-carrying giant turtles*. Not birds. What a foolish notion!

    *As documented in The Light Fantastic, a long paper by the late Sir Terence. D. J. Pratchett.

  3. says

    when they hatch they’re going to start screeching to be fed, which will be a bit terrifying, especially when their mama flies back to the solar system.

    Calm down. They’ll be scary to look at, but Dr. Ridley Scott’s hypothesis that in space nobody can hear you scream means we will be unable to hear them until they are too close to be avoided.