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...
I’ve been saving this one for a few months, specifically for my Halloween post! This was such an interesting story, it was hard for me to pass it up before. There are ghosts in these distant galaxies! Look at the images above, and see the ghostly green figures. They are ionized Oxygen, helium, nitrogen, sulphur, and neon that has absorbed high energy radiation and slowly re-emitted it over thousands of years. The photoionized gas clouds in the images are tens of thousands of light years outside their host galaxies, so where did this high energy radiation come from? The answer, is...
Since 2004, the Cassini spacecraft has been orbiting Saturn, giving us unprecedented views of the rings and Moons, and sending back data that has helped us to understand the dynamic nature of the Saturnian system. The flexibility of such a craft allows for new science goals to be determined in an ongoing basis, since new discoveries often lead to new questions and new areas to focus our resources on. Yesterday, October 28th, Cassini focused its resources on the geysers of Enceladus, flying lower than ever before over the surface of the icy moon, in an attempt to sample some of...
One of the greatest scientific discoveries of all time came with the invention of the spectroscope by Joseph Von Fraunhofer in 1814. It enabled us to look out at the universe and realize that the same basic building blocks that made you and I and all other life, were the same things that make up everything else in the cosmos. The tiny atoms in our bodies all started out at the center of a massive star billions of years ago. So naturally, when we talk about the odds of life forming elsewhere, we have to include a study of where...
The Sun. A bright fiery light in the sky to some, worshipped as a god by others, seen as a massive ball of hydrogen plasma 150 million kilometres away by scientists. Once in a while, the Sun goes ahead and releases massive amounts of charged plasma particles toward the Earth. The particles should eradicate humanity with horrible burns and render our planet lifeless, but luckily… they don’t. Why? The Earth’s magnetic field protects us, funnelling the particles to the poles where they ionize gases in the atmosphere and become harmless. The bonus for humanity, aside from not dying, is that we...
Now that New Horizons has passed by Pluto and it’s moons, it’s time we updated out images of the entire system. Taking images from New Horizons, today’s APOD shows the relative sizes of the moons with the best photos we have of them to date. Looking at the image, it makes sense that Nix and Hydra weren’t discovered until 2005, and that Kerberos and Styx were not found until 2012. The moons are so tiny and distant, and are dwarfed by the larger Charon and central Pluto. As far as we know, this is it for Pluto’s moons, since we haven’t...
Did you know that more than two-thirds of stars are part of multiple systems, where two or more stars orbit a common center of Gravity? This means that the Sun is one of the minority, being on its own. Most of the multiple systems out there are in fact double star systems, but some of them are triples and a few are quadruples. One such quadruple star system, known as DI Cha (in the chameleon constellation), was recently imaged by Hubble. The system lies in the southern constellation of Chameleon, about 520 light years away. The quadruple system is a...
News always reports the records. The biggest, the loudest, the fastest, the first. When it comes to Astronomy, there are so many new worlds to explore and so much new science to learn, we end up breaking records often. Even with Astronomy being the oldest science, the sheer amount of stuff in the universe means there is always something new and surprising to discover. Today’s episode of ‘Biggest, brightest, hottest’ brings us the move massive binary star system ever found, with two huge, hot stars so close together that they are actually touching, merging their atmospheres together. In the Large...
