About 170 years ago, a star nearly exploded in the Southern constellation Carina. I say nearly for a few reasons. On Earth, observers saw a dim, seemingly-average star become the second brightest star in the night sky. It stayed that way for 20 years before slowly fading. When we looked at it with telescopes, we found that whatever happened to Eta Carinae, it ejected more than 30 times the mass of our Sun in that short twenty year period, creating what we now call the homunculus nebula. Eta Carinae is a multiple star system 7500 light years away from Earth, so rest assured any...
Panspermia. Look it up. It sounds more like science fiction than science fact, but imagine the implications. It is the idea that life is everywhere, and is seeded throughout the universe by comets, asteroids, meteors, rogue planets, and even spacecraft, by way of unintended contamination of microbes. It could also explain why there is life on Earth. Because we still know so little about the Universe around us, panspermia is considered a plausible scenario. To test parts of this theory, a team from the University of Zurich’s Institute of Anatomy used small pipettes to actually place double stranded DNA on the outside of...
If you guessed that I was referring to the Pleiades, you are correct. The small open star cluster, Messier 45, is about 440 Light Years from Earth, relatively close for a star cluster. We are able to see it with the naked eye in Autumn and Winter here in the Northern Hemisphere. The stars in the Pleiades are young and bright blue, meaning they are very massive and hot. By young, I mean somewhere around a hundred Million Years, about 40 times younger than the Sun. The smears of blue in the above photo show that the cluster is still...
Have you ever heard of the Van Allen belts? If not you really should learn about them. After all, without them the majority of life on Earth could not survive. So what are they and how do they keep us alive? The Van Allen Belts are a collection of charged particles, held in place by the magnetic field of Earth, that act as a barrier to prevent the most harmful radiation from the Sun from reaching the surface of the Earth. They shift according to the incoming energy of the Sun, and if there is a large enough swell of...
When a large meteorite collides with the Earth, it can be travelling upwards of 40 Kilometres per second. This collision releases a huge amount of energy, which can vaporize rocks and create interesting and unique geological structures. For decades, scientists have been debating the existence of a rare type of crystal called Lonsdaleite, which is associated with impacts. Strange small crystals were discovered in Arizona in the 1950s around an ancient impact crater called ‘Canyon Diablo.’ It led some scientists to believe that the mineral had mechanical properties similar to diamond, but that it was structurally superior. If it existed in a pure form...
As the Canadian Winter approaches and our country goes into collective hibernation, we start to remind the world how cold it gets here, and that the tourist season is in July. Still, we Canadians are proud of our hardiness and we will welcome you with open arms if you decide to visit in January. Still, if you look at a population map of Canada, we mostly live in the southern 10% of our country’s latitudes. There are thousands of square kilometres of open wilderness to explore. We want to be warm, but we also love our home country. Many Canadians...
The seventh planet from the Sun is a boring one. The best photos we have of Uranus were obtained in January 1986 during the passing of Voyager 2, and they revealed a cold, pale-green, ball of Methane four times the diameter of Earth with very little visible activity. Since then, we’ve learned a lot about Uranus, and it’s far more interesting than we thought. It has rings, a magnetosphere, and numerous moons. It has a 98 degree axial tilt, meaning that the poles of the planet cycle through 42 years of sunlight and 42 years of darkness during it’s 84...
It’s been a week since the historic landing of Philae on the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, and the data keeps coming in. As an Astronomy communicator, I’m always looking for great visual aids in my Astronomy in Action Shows. They are more valuable to me than any piece of written news because they illustrate a concept quickly and efficiently. A picture truly is worth a thousand words. But audio and video can be worth even more! Recently an image of the Philae landing was released, showing two images approximately 2 minutes apart. This image gives a 3-Dimensional perspective of the comet as the...
Twenty Years of exoplanet research has seen incredible advances in detecting planets orbiting distant stars, as well as their size, orbit period, orbit distance, and even atmospheric composition. But the next step in understanding exoplanets is to learn about their magnetic fields. We know that many exoplanets should have magnetic fields. It makes sense, since nearly every world in our own solar system has some sort of magnetism. But for the first time, an international team of Astronomers, led by Kristina Kislyakova of the Space Research Institute of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, have discovered a way to detect magnetic fields...
Quasars are Galaxies with incredibly massive Black Holes at their centre. These Black Holes are fuelled by a swirling disc of material that can be ejected in a long jet along their axis of rotation, all due to the conservation of angular momentum. This accretion disc can be so hot that it causes the central region of the Galaxy to shine more brightly than the entire Galaxy of stars surrounding it. A Belgian team using the Very Large Telescope (VLT) studied a population of 93 Quasars spread over Billions of Light-Years, and noticed that the rotation axes of the Quasars...
