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...
Since it entered Saturnian orbit on July 1st, 2004, the Cassini spacecraft has changed our view of Saturn and its moons. It is a dynamic gas giant with unique and fascinating moons that have their own characteristics that make them seem more like small, rocky, planets than moons of a gas giant. Cassini has been delivering amazing science for over a decade, and it’s next journey lies in a polar orbit of Saturn, where it will dive through Saturn’s rings, giving the most detailed and close up views of the tiny ice particles that compose them. Before this journey, Cassini...
The surface of the Sun is around 5500 degrees Celsius. It’s hot, and it’s a completely different state of matter than the solid, liquid, and gas states that we are used to. However, this is a pretty balmy temperature compared to the solar atmosphere, which is heated to over a million degrees. But how does it get so hot compared to the surface? We know the core of the Sun, where fusion happens, is where temperatures can reach 14 Million degrees, but how is that energy radiated outward? And more importantly, how does it bypass the solar surface and make...
When Charles Messier catalogued 100 different objects in the night sky, he couldn’t have imagined the richness and detail of each one of his individual discoveries, or that we would ever see them in such incredible detail as to understand what they truly are and how they evolve. But every time I see a new image of a well-known object, I not only see the new and amazing details revealed, I see the next level of technology that enables us to see it in a new light. This image of Messier number 64 gives me that view. Messier 64 is...
This incredible video was just released by the National Space Society as the New Horizons team is primed to receive the first wave of data from the distant Pluto system. It feels more like a movie trailer, except that it is 100% true. I was left speechless by this amazing video and you will be too. The mission comes to a head on July 14th with the close flyby of Pluto and its five moons, though it’s possible there will be more moons discovered during the flyby. If you want the latest mission updates and to follow along, go to http://seeplutonow.com/. I...
What is the brightest object in the sky? Why the Sun of course. Second brightest? The Moon. Most people are able to answer this question quite easily, but what is the third brightest? The fourth? Many people will confidently say Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, or Polaris the north star. The answer is that the planet Venus is third and the planet Jupiter is fourth. It shouldn’t be that surprising that planets hold these positions. They are much closer than the distant background of stars, and the human species has been observing them since the dawn of recorded...
Since it’s landing made international headlines back in November as it landed on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, the Philae lander has been in hibernation mode, not able to generate enough power to operate due to a lack of direct sunlight on its solar panels. But after 7 months, as the comet has come closer to the Sun, the increasing solar intensity has given it the boost it needed to wake up! “Philae is doing very well: It has an operating temperature of -35ºC and has 24 Watts available,” explains DLR Philae Project Manager Dr. Stephan Ulamec. “The lander is ready for operations.” The...
Stars are far apart, especially compared to the everyday distances in human experience. The fastest a human being has ever travelled is just shy of 40 Km/s, and even at that incredible speed it would take 30,000 years to reach the closest star. That is an incredible distance no matter how you slice it. Taking it a step further, most stars in the sky are 20-200 times further away, and that’s just the population of stars we can see. So if we go beyond and talk about galaxies and the distances between them, we are literally talking astronomical quantities. Yet even with...
New Horizons is giving Earth the A-OK! All the systems look good and we are only 37.4 million kilometres away from Pluto. Yes that is far, but considering we usually see Pluto at a distance 200 times that, we are doing pretty well. The newest processed photos have come in from NASA and John’s Hopkins University, and they are starting to show a complex and mysterious surface chock-full of science goodies that make astronomers salivate like Pavlov’s dog when the bell rang. But image processing is a science in itself, and I wanted to show you the difference between a raw photo...
The vast majority of the articles you see in the world of science are written by a professional science writer about a postdoctoral fellow and a tenured professor who made a major discovery in a collaboration with another tenured professor from across an ocean working at a multi-million dollar supercomputer run by a wealthy world-renowned institution. And yet there is a huge amount of talk in the education world about how we have to find ways to teach and inspire our kids to participate in the process of discovery and integrate STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math). If we want to...
