On Saturday, March 23rd, I arrived home before 8pm, and proceeded to power down all my electronics and turn off all my lights, before heading over to my friend’s place to watch the Leafs game. Since it was the Earth Hour event, I wanted to contribute to the power down for the entire night. While walking along St.Clair Avenue W in Toronto, I noticed that the night sky was particularly clear, and as I walked a bit further it dawned on me that I couldn’t see all of the buildings in the downtown core, usually visible from St.Clair. It seems...
Okay so 100 million years seems like a big mistake on the part of Astronomers, but in the astronomical community its a small adjustment. Today the most detailed map of the CMBR ever captured was released by the Planck telescope group at the ESA. Based on 15.5 months of data, it shows the tiny temperature variations that were present when the universe had a temperature of 2700 degrees Celsius and an age of just 380,000 years (trust me that’s small on astronomical scales). This is the point when the dense soup of protons and electrons formed hydrogen atoms, and the universe became transparent. As...
Alpha Centauri. Not only is it an alien in Dr.who, a strategy game released in 1999, and an album released by the German electronic band tangerine dream, but it’s the brightest star in our closest stellar system. Named for being the brightest star in the constellation Centaurus in the southern sky, its a little over 4 light years away from Earth, and is very similar to our sun in terms of size, age, mass, composition, and temperature. Here is a great infographic from Space.com. Scientists have recently discovered that Alpha Centauri shares yet another resemblance to our home star: It has a strange, cooler...
This morning was the launch of the second SpaceX dragon capsule mission, officially designated mission CRS-2. It launched at 10:10am today, Friday, March 1st from Cape Canaveral space launch complex 40. A bit of background on Dragon: The two-stage rocket uses 9 engines to power the first stage out of the atmosphere, before the single rocket stage 2 takes the capsule the rest of the way. The 14.4 foot tall dragon capsule is capable of carrying more than 7000 lbs of cargo split between pressurized and unpressurized sections. On March 2nd, Astronauts will use the CanadaArm 2 to grab onto the capsule...
