It takes a long time for things to change in the Universe. Time takes on an entirely different role when it comes to the lives of planets, stars, and galaxies. A million years in the life of a star or planet is the equivalent of a single day in the life of a human being. Human lifetimes come and go while stars and planets stay pretty much the same. However, just like human lives, where many days can build up to an important event, millions of years of lead-up can produce some incredible changes to a planet or star. New...
We know that the giant bright light in the sky that keeps us warm is so much more than we can see. A star, like countless others in the sky, close enough to outshine all of them. The Sun is a dynamic object, endlessly churning and burping plasma beyond it’s boundaries into the solar system and beyond. NASA spacecraft and ground-based telescopes have been keeping eyes on the Sun for years to characterize its 11-year magnetic cycle. And every so often they have a front-row seat to the massive blasts that just can’t be seen with human eyes. The first...
When we see the Earth’s only Moon up in the sky, we often think about how small it is. It’s only about 1/4 the diameter of the Earth, and at a distance of 384,000 Km, it looks small in the sky. But often size is entirely a matter of perspective. What we compare something to, that’s what determines it’s size. When the Moon is high in the sky we easily compare it to the size of the window we are looking through, or to a nearby tree, or our outstretched hand. All of this can make the Moon seem pretty tiny....
Looking at the universe in radio waves is a fascinating sight. For one, the radio sky is very weak; If you placed your cellphone on the Moon facing back at Earth, it would be brighter than all other radio sources in the entire sky by a factor of a million. But as with every other part of the electromagnetic spectrum, it has scientific value in studying the sky. Over the past decade, astronomers have been identifying several Fast Radio Bursts (FRB), short bursts of radio waves from different places in the universe that last for a few short seconds. These are...
Baryonic matter, which is everything we are made of and everything we can see in the universe, is not a lot of stuff. I mean to a tiny Earthling, it’s a heck of a lot, but if you put it all together it only makes up about 5% of the total Mass-Energy in the Universe. If you’ve ever seen the Millennium simulation, it highlights the fact that both baryonic and dark matter are organized into filaments of mass, with the baryonic matter at the densest points, ie the galaxies. What lies between these dense nodes and filaments are vast empty...
I decided to take my own personal leap day on writing about the leap day. Partly due to being busy at work, and partly due to lack of mental faculties. All that aside, it’s only another 1,459 days until the next leap day, so we better start preparing. A leap year occurs because the solar system seems to slightly disagree with the way we manage time. Earth’s trip around the Sun, a year, doesn’t take exactly 365 days each lasting 24 hours. It takes a bit longer. A year is actually 8,765 hours, or 525,949 minutes, which is 365 days, 5...
