Eight minutes after launching from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, a Russian Proton-M rocket experienced a catastrophic failure in its third stage rocket, resulting in the complete atmospheric burn-up of the rocket and its payload, a Mexican Communications Satellite. After launching at 11:47am local time in Kazakhstan, the rocket experienced an emergency situation 497 seconds into the flight, reported as a failure in the rocket’s Breeze-M third stage. The carrier rocket was launching the Mexsat 1 communications satellite, known as Centenario, into orbit, in a contract with the Mexican government. After reaching a 161 Km altitude, the rocket failed and fell back to...
Its no secret that Elon Musk wants to go to Mars, and if he keeps steering the ship of amazing work done by SpaceX, he will have full support. He has been candid about mistakes, honest about goals, and modest about successes. So with Mars on the horizon in the future, here are some tourism posters made by SpaceX. All images courtesy of SpaceX. They have such a retro 50s sci-fi feel, which I love. It’s making fun of all those old campy posters, but there is a decidedly romantic feel to them, especially for anyone who has dreamed of...
It sounds like something out of a science fiction novel. The incredible and rare dark star cluster, hiding the evil super villain’s headquarters. A dark star cluster is something I would imagine as a spooky, eerie type of place where everything you see changes when you enter its space. Science fiction aside, a dark star cluster is real, and it’s a new type of cluster that is similar to the mighty dense globular clusters that orbit most galaxies. Globular clusters orbit in a halo of space around the centres of galaxies, and though our Milky Way harbours 150 of them,...
It has been well established that Galaxies have formed during the last 13.7 Billion years of cosmic evolution. They didn’t just pop into existence, but developed in a long and arduous process that spans immense time. Many of them will continue to flourish for many Billions of years. If Galaxies do indeed have a birth, as has been seen, it stands to reason that they should someday ‘die’ as well. But have we ever seen the death of a galaxy? Have we ever seen the end for a massive collective structure of stars? We have seen galaxies collide and merge...
I always love to chat about stories by close-to-home scientists. I just talked recently about some University of Waterloo cosmological work, but today I can follow it up with a very close to home scientist that I’ve run into a few times. Something about seeing the achievements of those you know makes you feel pride too – it gives us all a good reason to support friends, colleagues, and even acquaintances, since we can share in their passion. Astronomer Lisa Esteves, a PhD candidate from the University of Toronto, has been watching exoplanets carefully with the Kepler Space Telescope, seeing...
By now, if you keep up with Astronomy news even a little bit, you’ve heard of the strange white spot on the surface of Ceres, within a large crater in the dwarf planet’s northern hemisphere. As the science mission of the Dawn spacecraft continues, we are starting to see new images of the surface in unprecedented detail, and finally we have a closer view of the mystery spot. Is the new series of images enough to determine its origin? See for yourself. The only thing clear from these new images is that what once appeared to be a single or...
Solar Flares happen, especially during the current peak of solar activity. Here’s a cool video from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO).
That’s right it is not always Polaris. Over a human lifetime Polaris will always be our north star, but in the year 14,000, it will be the bright star Vega. This is due to the tilt of the Earth’s axis, which precesses like a spinning top, albeit much more slowly, over a 32,000 year period.
The Andromeda Galaxy is the closest large spiral to our own Milky Way, and the only major Galaxy moving toward us. Turns out its on a direct collision course, but we still have 3.5 Billion years to prepare, so its not exactly pressing news. On the plus side, studying Andromeda allows us to infer properties of more distant galaxies, and it gives us a map of what our own Milky Way Galaxy may look like. Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have discovered a giant halo of gas around Andromeda, and the Milky Way may have a similar one. By...
Massive star clusters can pop into existence in a matter of a few million years, a very short period of time on astronomical time scales. They consist of hundreds or thousands of massive, bright, hot stars that will live relatively short lives of a few hundred millions of years. Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA), astronomers have discovered a vanishingly rare molecular cloud of highly dense gas, containing no stars. It is poised to become a massive star cluster, and we found it in its infancy. “We may be witnessing one of the most ancient and extreme modes of...
