Even after a decade of interloping among the Saturnian system, the Cassini spacecraft is still doing great science. It helps that there are lots of places to visit, since Saturn has 62 moons and the largest ring system of the gas giants. Arguably the best science has come from Saturn’s largest moon Titan, second largest moon in the solar system (behind Ganymede) and the only moon known to have an atmosphere. Since Cassini has been in orbit around Saturn and it’s system of moons, it’s been revealed that over 1.6 million square kilometers of Titan’s surface are covered in liquid...
Until the recent discovery of gravitational waves, the only ‘sense’ that astronomers had was vision. Granted our ‘vision’ with telescopes is far broader than human eyes, we still need to find ingenious ways to use the precious photons that rain down on Earth. One of the new ways astronomers are using light is to look at what we call a ‘light echo.’ In reality it’s a reflection of starlight. When a new star is forming, it is accompanied by a protoplanetary disk, which will eventually form all the planets of the system. Our own solar system went through this stage 4.5...
There are eight planets in the Solar System. This statement makes a lot of people angry for several different reasons. The obvious group to respond with anger is the ‘people for Pluto,’ who have an unwavering dedication to the little planet that could. It’s scientifically recognized as a dwarf Planet, and is still one step up from a Kuiper Belt Object (KBO), so it’s doing well. Far beyond Pluto, in the outer recesses of our Solar system, you may have heard of a potential Super-Earth-sized Planet recently theorized by Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown. This is the other reason people would...
I feel like I’ve been covering a lot of stories on magnetic fields over the past few months. Fields around the Earth, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter’s Moons, and exoplanets are just some of the places in the universe where we are looking at magnetic field behaviour. The intention is to use our understanding of magnetism to figure out what is inside these worlds, and how they interact with their space environment. You would expect us to understand the Earth’s magnetic field and interior very well, after all, we are stuck here. But it turns out it’s very difficult to study the interior of...
One of my first books on Astronomy was about the planets. It had a collection of pictures from the first missions to each of the worlds in our solar system. Seeing those photos, the planets felt so alien, so different, and the perspective was like something out a 1950s science fiction comic. But now, with modern advancements in imaging technology and rocketry, we can send heavier instruments to distant worlds, and see them in high definition. It changes the perspective and makes the world seem more familiar than alien, more livable and real. Take a look at the first picture...
Jupiter has aurora. It’s not surprising since it has a very powerful magnetic field. It’s only natural that the two largest structures in the solar system, the Sun’s solar wind influence (called the heliosphere) and Jupiter’s magnetosphere, should be constantly battling. But don’t expect to see Jupiter’s aurora through a backyard telescope. The result of this battle is far more energetic, producing an aurora invisible to the human eye, one made of X-rays. The Sun constantly blasts charged particles off into space in all directions, assaulting the planets, moons, and other solar system bodies. It is this blast of solar wind that gives...
One of the most surprising and intriguing finds during the decade-long Cassini mission has been the discovery of geysers on the Moon Enceladus. Originally spotted in 2005, scientists have spent the last decade trying to understand how they work. And now they finally have a working model. How does an eruption on a frigid Moon last so long? Eruptions on Earth are not long-lived, and if they are, they are very spread out. For Enceladus to have a ton of localized geysers in the South polar region, you need some pretty specific scenarios. Aside from the fact that a constant stream of material could clog...
It’s always funny explaining astronomical time to a non-scientist. I often get the craziest looks when I mention a million years as being a ‘blip on the radar.’ Perhaps there is some immortal alien race out there who would understand how nothing much happens on the scale of the universe in a million years. To humanity and our ever-accelerating advancement, a million years is thrice the age of our entire species. But I guess Einstein was right when he said that ‘it’s all relative.’ This brings us to Saturn, a planet as ancient as the solar system. Moderately old in...
The most violent single event in the universe is the death of a massive star, a supernova. We have seen several different types, though the common element is a massive explosion, taking a star hiding amongst the background into an eruption that outshines it’s entire host galaxy. We have seen the brightness grow and fade over the duration of a supernova event, but we have never seen one just as it’s starting. Until now. Would you ever have thought that the Kepler space telescope, a planet hunter that continuously observes stars, could see supernovae? The key is in the words ‘continuously observed.’ By keeping...
Every time we see amazing photos of galaxies or planetary disks, we can see most of the detail since we see them face on. But since the orientation of spiral galaxies in the universe is random, there are a plethora of galaxies ignored by image processors since we just can’t see much of the detail. We can still learn from edge-on spiral galaxies, just not as much as we can from those that are face on. We can see some fascinating dust lanes in the image above, and a ton of detail considering the view, but we don’t know what...
