The mysteries of the Occator crater on Ceres have continued to puzzle astronomers and the public, even as we have seen increasing resolution in recent photos. The latest photos show a resolution of 140 meters per pixel and reveal striking details, though the jury is still out on what exactly the bright material is and where it came from. It seems incredibly likely that the bright spots are ices of some sort, maybe even water ice, since Ceres is a water-rich body, and may have more water than Earth! One hypothesis is that Ceres has a subsurface layer of water,...
Maybe I am a starry-eyed dreamer, or maybe I just treat astronomy like a little kid opening birthday presents, but every time I see a new Hubble image I am blown away by it. Today’s mind-blowing photo is of Messier 63, the Sunflower Galaxy, located in Canes Venatici. It shows the central region of the galaxy and out tot he spiral arms. The arms are clearly visible due to the bright blue clusters of newly formed stars intermixed with dark patched of thick gas and dust. In between the arms lie older, redder stars. Closest to the centre, the yellowish...
Ask an astronomer what the hardest thing to do is in astronomy, and chances are they will say ‘measuring distance accurately.’ It is surprisingly difficult to take the light from stars we see and match them to a correct distance. In the past we have used several different methods depending on how close a star is to us. For the nearest stars we use parallax, which looks at the change in a star’s position as the Earth is on opposite sides of it’s orbit. All other methods rely on what we call the standard candle approach. Let’s say you had...
Nothing like a rocket launch in the early morning to inspire and wake you up. The 4 Million Newtons of thrust and a weight of over 500 tons gives a nice blast of power to your morning that coffee never could. I am talking about the Atlas V rocket that launched on September 2nd, carrying a US Navy communications satellite up into orbit. There is a lot happening in this medium exposure photo. The rocket blasts off in a bright flash, then climbs into the atmosphere, where its exhaust plume becomes a noctilucent cloud, illuminated by the Sun that hasn’t...
Remember that amazing high-def photo of M31, the Andromeda Galaxy, from Hubble a few months back? It was able to separate the light from the galaxy into the millions of visible stars that populate its spiral arms. This image is used for far more than the wow factor of seeing another galaxy up close. It allows us to study the entire galaxy and gain insights into the lives of spiral galaxies beyond our own, how they formed, how they evolve, and maybe even how they will eventually die. By looking at the spiral arms of M31, where the youngest and...
A bright fireball appeared in the sky over Hawaii a couple of days ago. It appeared to break into several pieces and burn up in the atmosphere. Naturally one would expect it to be a meteor, but if you take a look at the video below, it sticks around a little bit too long for that. Aside from the over-the-top reaction of those watching, it’s not as exciting and quick as a meteor. In fact, most meteors can move through the sky at up to 70 km/s, enough to burn up quickly and leave a bright flash in their wake....
Lovely Earth is not entirely lonely. We have five planets that have been observed since the dawn of civilization. The five are visible with the naked eye in the sky at different times of year, and were given the name planets as a derivation of the Greek ‘planetes,’ meaning ‘wanderers.’ They do wander, or at least they appear to move against the background of the stars, since they are much closer to the Earth as it orbits the Sun. So what planets are visible this month? For September 2015 and back to school, you had better be willing to get...
The concept of Panspermia is a description of all life in the Galaxy having been seeded by other life, all originating at one point. This life can hitch a ride from star to star on comets, meteorites, and rogue planets. It’s true we have never found evidence for life outside of our own home planet, but if panspermia is a viable theory, it could mean that life is everywhere, just waiting for us to find it. In a new study from astronomers as the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, panspermia creates ‘oases’ where pockets of life form. As life is able...
If you ask someone what the craziest, most powerful, energetic, and enigmatic thing in the universe is, chances are they will say a black hole. After all, we know so little about them, we have never directly seen one, and we can see their influence across space and time. But there is apparently another notch on the crazy powerful cosmic object front. Like turning the volume knob to eleven, a binary system of supermassive black holes has been discovered in a nearby quasar. A quasar is an incredibly bright core of a distant galaxy, shining brighter than the entire galaxy...
How often does a star explode as a supernova in the Milky Way? With as many as 400 Billion stars, you would expect it to happen often But stars live a very long time, and most massive stars take anywhere from a few hundred million to a few billion years to reach maturity and explode. Putting all this together gives us a surprisingly human estimate. A supernova explodes in the Milky Way, on average, once every 50 years, or about once per human lifetime. We can still see remnants of great explosions that happened long ago, still expanding into the...
