Space is incredibly dangerous, in case you didn’t know. Harmful radiation, bitter cold, low pressure, no air, and no gravity make for a very difficult environment to survive in. Even though a space capsule is pressurized with breathable air, protected with radiation shields, and warmed to a comfortable temperature, the effects of microgravity are still damaging to the human body. We know that astronauts lose bone mass rapidly, have to exercise to keep their muscles active, but what other effects does microgravity have on the body? For one, without gravity to clear your sinuses, they get a bit clogged in...
Sometimes I love to say ‘I told you so,’ though in the world of science it’s more like ‘I gave you a high probability of this plausible scenario.’ A little while back a story broke about a star called KIC 8462852, with a strange ring of material surrounding it. One potential explanation was that an extraterrestrial civilization has constructed a giant ring to harvest it’s home star’s energy. Though this was one of a dozen possible explanations, it of course gathered the most steam among the general populace. In a statement today, officials from the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) confirmed that...
It’s that wonderful time of year again, when Halloween passes, and Christmas commercials dictate the airwaves. I’m still in the tolerant stages of hearing bells ringing in commercials, where they remind me that the northern hemisphere is once again treated to a familiar sight. The return of the Orion nebula! In reality, it didn’t go anywhere. Earth’s predictable motion around the Sun means that Northern Hemisphere observers see the sky gradually appear to move a bit further West each night. This is the time of year when Orion rises around 9pm, making it easily visible by midnight. I consider midnight...
We know that Mars lost an ocean of water, but what was the exact mechanism? We also know that the magnetic field of Mars was lost a long time ago, and contributed to this major loss of water and atmosphere. In a press conference today, NASA officials working with data from the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft, have shown that major solar storms have increased the amount of atmosphere and water loss over time. “Mars appears to have had a thick atmosphere warm enough to support liquid water which is a key ingredient and medium for life as...
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...
It always fascinates me to see videos and photographs from the International Space Station (ISS), how simple day to day activities are so altered because of the altered Physics of constant free fall in orbit around the Earth. Many of the videos are showing what people call the ‘effects of zero gravity.’ This is actually not the case. There is gravity in space. Let’s take a closer look at the situation of an ISS astronaut. If we do the math (I do realize the term ‘do the math’ turns away a lot of people, so I will keep it short),...
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...
