This story popped up yesterday, and I can imagine it will go far, since it talks about life in the universe. I get it, it’s what people are interested in, and at least this story is focused on the science of why this is the best place to look for intelligent civilizations, instead of “Oh hey there’s a strange ring of material around a star, must be an alien superstructure.” But I digress. So where is the best place to look for life in the universe? The answer is in a Globular Cluster. A globular cluster is one of the...
If you actually had the ability to see X-Rays, the world around you would look pretty boring. Actually it would be invisible, since nothing around you gives off X-rays. You might be able to see an imaging device if you live or work near a medical office, but that’s about it. If you looked at the night sky, you would see many interesting sources of X-Ray light, mostly from active black holes in our own galaxy and beyond. Recently a high-resolution scan of the Andromeda Galaxy revealed a plethora of sources, showing where black holes and neutron stars are feeding...
As we rang in the new year, we were treated to a special astronomical appearance of Comet C/2013 US10 Catalina, close to the bright star Arcturus in the image below. Also visible near the top is the faint Comet P/19 Borrelly, and between the two comets is a bright meteor that swept through the scene. It’s remarkable to notice the clearly visible tales of Catalina, the blue ion tail sweeping directly away from the Sun due to solar wind pressure, and the dusty white tail marking the path of the comet. The dust is too heavy to be swept away...
Exoplanets are light years away, hidden by their parent stars, and barely detectable. Yet even though most have never been directly imaged, we can study the light from the parent star as the planet passes in front of it, and use this information to learn about the planet’s size and composition, especially if it has an atmosphere. Once you know a little bit about how big and dense a planet is, and the major elements that form it’s crust and atmosphere, you can do a lot of Chemistry to figure out what it should be made of and how these...
Some days at work, when I am in the Space hall at the Ontario Science Center, I take a close look at the golf-ball-sized Moon rock we have on display. I think about how this rock was brought back on an Apollo mission over 40 years ago, how it had been an untouched part of the Moon for Billions of years before this, and how it has taught us so much about how the Moon, and subsequently the Earth, formed. But now it’s time for a new generation of Moon rocks to be analyzed, and China is in the nation...
After talking about high resolution mapping of Ceres last week, it occurred to me that we have mapped so many distant worlds in our solar system. We have seen moons of Jupiter and Saturn up close, completely mapped Mars, and started mapping Pluto, pushing our boundaries of exploration. But what about our Moon? Sure the Earth-facing side has been seen in high definition. Anyone with a small telescope and a camera can take a great photo of the Moon. But what about the other side of the Moon, the so called dark side? It turns out that the Lunar Reconnaissance...
