Sometimes I love to say ‘I told you so,’ though in the world of science it’s more like ‘I gave you a high probability of this plausible scenario.’ A little while back a story broke about a star called KIC 8462852, with a strange ring of material surrounding it. One potential explanation was that an extraterrestrial civilization has constructed a giant ring to harvest it’s home star’s energy. Though this was one of a dozen possible explanations, it of course gathered the most steam among the general populace. In a statement today, officials from the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) confirmed that...
It’s that wonderful time of year again, when Halloween passes, and Christmas commercials dictate the airwaves. I’m still in the tolerant stages of hearing bells ringing in commercials, where they remind me that the northern hemisphere is once again treated to a familiar sight. The return of the Orion nebula! In reality, it didn’t go anywhere. Earth’s predictable motion around the Sun means that Northern Hemisphere observers see the sky gradually appear to move a bit further West each night. This is the time of year when Orion rises around 9pm, making it easily visible by midnight. I consider midnight...
We know that Mars lost an ocean of water, but what was the exact mechanism? We also know that the magnetic field of Mars was lost a long time ago, and contributed to this major loss of water and atmosphere. In a press conference today, NASA officials working with data from the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft, have shown that major solar storms have increased the amount of atmosphere and water loss over time. “Mars appears to have had a thick atmosphere warm enough to support liquid water which is a key ingredient and medium for life as...
Out of the over 2000 confirmed exoplanets, not one has been seen in the conventional sense, where we would see it’s surface, map out features and colours, and understand it’s atmosphere or surface from what we saw. Instead all the knowledge we have of exoplanets is based on the light we see. How big is the dip in the Kepler Telescope’s light curve? What absorption features do the reflected light of this planet show? This information is the result of careful analysis and brilliant inference, since the planets themselves are immeasurably tiny and hard to spot next to their giant...
It has been 15 years since November 2nd, 2000, when Astronauts first occupied the International Space Station. Since then, it has been inhabited continuously by a team of up to six people. 220 citizens of Earth from 17 nations have flown with $100 Billion station over many 45 minute orbits of our planet. The men and women who have spent time aboard the station have had a view of our world that so many people have never experienced. Seeing the planet as a planet, one of countless other worlds in a dark empty void dotted by stars, it changes your perspective on...
Halloween is an amazing chance for people to be someone (or something) they have always wanted to be. To step outside of their norm and live their life as an alter ego, if only for one night. This is why so many people have crazy Halloween stories, and why the ‘holiday’ captivates us so much. With humanity’s excellent pattern recognition skills, we tend to see spooky things in space, where if you would just turn the picture 90 degrees, it probably would look like some other item from human experience, and not be spooky after all. Here are a few...
