There has been a lot to talk about with our home solar system lately. Spacecraft approaching dwarf planets, robots on Mars, and all kinds of orbiters giving new insights and views we had never expected. It’s a heavy news year for Planetary Science, and the great stories keep creeping up! Today we have an update on the Dawn spacecraft approaching Ceres. The picture I posted on January 20th (shown below) was from 380,000 Km away, comparable to the distance between Earth and the Moon. Now, about 2 weeks later, Dawn is only 145,000 Km away, and the view is much clearer!...
Being 2015, there has been a lot of talk about the New Horizons spacecraft in the first month of the year, since it’s due to reach it’s rendezvous with the enigmatic dwarf planet in July. I remember watching the launch in 2006 while in university, and have been talking about it to audiences during my planetarium shows. I feel close to the mission, and being able to see it reach Pluto this year brings back the first feelings I ever had about discovering the universe as a child. So when the spacecraft woke up a few weeks ago, so did...
Today I found a few nice images that I wanted to talk about, and each one revealed something different about the object that was being imaged. I thought it would be a good chance to show everyone how astronomy is really the study of patterns of light, speaking from a minimalist perspective. We learn literally everything about the Universe beyond the solar system from the photons we see. From photons we can deduce the mass, distance, density, composition, behaviour, formation, and evolution of the cosmos. Pretty stellar! (pun intended) Here are some recent images and what we learn from them....
If I told you that humanity was going to mine the Moon for rare elements and water ice, you might think it was the plot of a science fiction book I was writing. However, with the recent strides made by unmanned space missions, coupled with a discovery of water and rare elements near the lunar surface, that story could become fact sooner than you’d think. It’s been 40 years since the Apollo landings on the Moon, and for a long time we naively thought we had discovered everything there was to discover about the Moon. We assumed it was a big...
This amazing video from animator Alphonse Swineheart gives us an idea of the vastness of space, showing how incredibly large our solar system is. There are a few long trips between planets, but some fun facts keep it interesting. Plus the point is that we are getting an idea of the scale of it all. One thing to keep in mind is that each second the viewer is travelling 300,000 Km, equivalent to circumnavigating the Earth almost 8 times! A good thing to remember is that if we were seeing the distance to the next star, proxima centauri, this video...
Last year we received some incredible news about Cosmology and the Big Bang. An experiment devised to find the signature of the inflationary model of the Universe told the world they had done it! The world cheers, as did many scientists; but of course there are always reasons to be sceptical, especially with claims that have such an impact for humanity let alone the science world. And now it seems the scepticism was correct, as the conclusive result has now been deemed inconclusive. This doesn’t mean its false, not by a long shot, but it does mean the research team...
