As is the case with any final approach to a new object, the early images, with their horrible resolution, pixelated appearance, and possibly false features due to processing, lead to significant speculation on what we will see as the craft approaches. It was the same a few months ago with Ceres. I personally love the blurry images. It’s a mystery waiting to be solved, and we see it unfold as we move ever closer to our destination. It also reminds me of the early days of the internet I grew up with, using a good old 28.8K modem and waiting 2...
For the last few months, Venus and Jupiter have been visible in the night sky. Venus makes it’s usual 584 day cycle, becoming an ‘evening star’ once again, reaching far from the Sun in the West, while still following our central star. Jupiter has slowly worked its way westward over the past few months, due more in part to Earth’s orbit than Jupiter’s. Finally, the long-awaited conjunction of the planets is nigh, and it offers the best views and photographic opportunities of the year for professional and amateur astronomers alike. What is the brightest object in the sky? The Sun...
How do we determine the size of the Universe? How do we know how far away the planets and stars are? How can we measure it without ever being there? The answer, as it always is in Astronomy, is light! More Photons = More Science! Here’s my video explaining the concepts of Parallax, spectroscopic parallax, and type 1a supernovae! Space is big, and although we can figure out how big it is, its another challenge all together to understand and comprehend its sheer size.
The true story of why Pluto isn’t a planet goes back further than you would think. It has a lot to do with our understanding of science at the time, and a lot more to do with surprising luck. I made this video a couple of days ago for the Khan Academy Talent Search. I hope you enjoy it. It will be interesting as we move into better telescope technologies that allow us to see further into the depths of the solar system and the universe. What strange mysteries will we find?
Woman got the worse deal when author John Gray wrote a book titled ‘Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus.’ The point he was clearly making was about the communication issues between the sexes, but men definitely got the better deal in home worlds. For one, Mars is kind of cold, has polar ice caps, is covered in rust and dust, has been pretty dead inside for millions of years, and is bombarded with radiation from the Sun (you can draw your own parallels to men yourself). But Venus, with its 400 degree Celsius temperature, sulphuric acid rain, incredibly...
The Dawn space craft has finally begun its science phase after settling into a 13,500 Km orbit around the dark dwarf planet Ceres. It took some manoeuvring to get it in the right spot, but now it has begun mapping the surface as it slowly orbits once every two weeks. A lovely mosaic image from the space craft is the latest jaw-dropping picture of the former asteroid. Like a great shot of the Lunar terminator, by seeing the shadows created by the light from the Sun, we can get a sense of depth of the heavy craters on the surface....
Okay so even though it is technically the first ever Earth-borne object to ever touch the surface of Mercury, it isn’t as hopeful as one might expect from the planet’s best and brightest scientists. But in all fairness we have crash landed on Mars, the Moon, and into the clouds of Jupiter, so it’s not uncommon. The Messenger spacecraft has been in space since 2004, orbiting the Sun multiple times in order to arrive at Mercury in 2008. Since then it has completed 4,103 orbits and obtained an incredible amount of scientific data as the first ever space probe to...
The recent launch of the Russian Progress spacecraft to resupply the International Space Station has entered a fast spin of about 20-30 RPM. The resupply mission has been aborted and currently mission controllers are focussing on salvaging the craft, attempting to regain control before it`s orbit degrades, sending it into the Earth`s atmosphere where it will burn up. Time will tell if the 3000 lbs of supplies and experiments survive.
It’s always nice to know that amazing science is being done in local institutions. Here in Ontario, Canada, we have 24 universities, and I had the pleasure of attending two of them, giving me a first hand look at the day to day work of astronomers. It certainly helped me realize how hard scientists work to get one simple result that the public will only care about for a day or two. About 95% of the work, from grant writing to data acquisition to data reduction to analysis and interpretation, is behind the scenes, and the final 5%, the result,...
100,000 Galaxies. Each one contains Billions upon Billions of stars. Each star could have planets, leading to countless possibilities of variation and the potential for life. But would we see the signs of civilization from Earth? Could a highly advanced civilization control the entire population of stars in their galaxy and harness that energy for their industry? Would they alter their stellar environment enough that we could see them? This is exactly the line of questioning that led astronomers to look at over 100,000 different nearby galaxies in mid-infrared emission to see some potential signs of Alien life. In these...
