I recently had the opportunity to watch a brand new IMAX feature, called A Beautiful Planet. It features incredible views of the Earth from space, captured by astronauts aboard the International Space Station. Most of the footage was taken during Expedition 42 on the ISS, starting with the arrival of Samantha Cristoforetti, Terry Virts, and Anton Shkaplerov aboard the Soyuz TMA-15M, and ending with their departure. Much of the film was focused on the views of Earth, the scenic diversity of life and land that can only be seen from space. It was difficult to see the effects of humans during the day time,...
At this stage of our understanding of the planet Mars, we have seen salty water flowing (recurring slope lineae), found evidence of ancient riverbeds, and seen seasonal changes in the polar caps. But an important question is how does water behave on Mars? A bit of science here on Earth gives some insight. Water at sea level on Earth boils at 100 degrees Celsius, which actually defined the Celsius scale. But as pressure changes, liquids boil at different temperatures. As the atmosphere gets thinner, the boiling temperature of water decreases. On Mars, with it’s extremely thin atmosphere, this means that water...
When could the Moon possibly be brighter than the Sun? The Sun is much bigger, produces energy, and gives all the energy needed for life on Earth. But if you look at the sky in gamma rays, the highest energy photons on the electromagnetic spectrum, you’ll see the Moon more easily than the Sun. Why? The Moon is the brightest gamma ray source in the sky, because it has no atmosphere or magnetic field. Essentially it has no protection from the dangerous cosmic rays that are constantly zipping through space. When they hit the Earth’s atmosphere they create a cosmic...
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...
It’s been nine months since NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft flew past Pluto. Time sure does fly. And even though the spacecraft is moving further from Pluto and Earth, it’s still sending back the massive amounts of data it gathered during closest approach. As this data is received, the huge team of scientists that are part of the mission use it to characterize Pluto so humanity can begin to understand just how strange the distant dwarf Planet is. Five new papers characterize some of the latest science done on the enigmatic world. Here’s a quick summary of each: The first paper from...
With the recent discovery of gravitational waves, we now have a target for probing the very early universe, close to the big bang. This is because gravitational waves can travel across the universe unimpeded, meaning those created after the big bang are still bouncing around today. It’s like the big bang was the ringing of a giant bell, and the ringing can still be heard. But all of our Easter eggs are not in one basket. There is another way to probe the very early universe, one we haven’t found yet, because it involves particles that are very tiny and...
In 2014, comet C/2013 A1, known as sliding spring, came within 140,000 Km of the planet Mars. This is a bit more than a third of the distance from the Earth to the Moon. Comets are small, so gravitationally this interaction was insignificant, but from an electromagnetic point of view, things were shaken up big time! Comets are small, relatively speaking. A typical comet is a few kilometers across, about the size of a big city. But with sunlight melting ices and liberating gases and dust from the comet’s interior, the part of the comet we see in the sky,...
I love false-colour images. They reveal detail that you can’t see in real life, but they also highlight things in an artistic way. For me it’s an excellent marriage of art and science, and as a communicator it helps me get concepts across in an accessible way. So when I saw the APOD image of Saturn from earlier this week, I had to discuss it. Saturn never has looked this way, and it never will. The colours are vivid and unrealistic, but they show the differences in three distinct but close wavelengths of light on the electromagnetic spectrum. All of...
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...
