Space Junk is a growing problem. Even though there is a lot of room in low Earth orbit, it’s estimated that 3,000 tons of space debris is floating around at different altitudes and speeds, posing a significant threat to present and future orbital infrastructure. The number of objects classed as space junk doubled in 2014 to 4000 individual pieces, mostly due to collisions between objects already in space. Most of this space junk is old derelict satellites and rocket bodies and engines leftover from 50 years of space exploration. Because of the wide variety of altitudes, trajectories, and speeds, it can...
After reaching a deeper understanding of the subsurface ocean of Enceladus just yesterday, a stunning discovery has just been made about the largest Moon in the solar system. The largest moon of Jupiter, Ganymede, contains a subsurface ocean of it’s own. The discovery was made with the Hubble space telescope and a careful study of aurora on the giant moon. That’s right Ganymede has auroral activity. This is because it is the only moon in the solar system with a magnetic field. The magnetic field funnels radiation from the Sun toward the north and south poles, where it ionizes molecules...
At least once a month we hear of a new exoplanet with a strange and amazing story. From the ‘Super-Saturn’ ringed world to Magnetic Fields to systems of three Earths, there is an abundance of planets and strange systems. The latest weird discovery brings us to a star 1,500 light years away in the constellation Cygnus. The small-Mercury sized planet it hosts orbits in only 16 hours, bringing its surface temperature to over 1,800 degrees celsius. This amount of heat is enough to vapourize rock, and so the star is literally roasting the planet and blasting away its surface. The dust...
With all the amazing Science coming from Mars in the last decade, its seems easy to conclude that humans have a good understanding of our rusty neighbour. And then something new and unexpected happens. To someone who thought we knew all there was to know, this may be a disappointment. But to a scientist who has a passion for discovery, new and unexpected results are where the biggest breakthroughs happen! Massive plumes have been spotted high in the atmosphere of Mars, at an altitude of over 250 Km, where the thin Martian atmosphere is nearly indistinguishable from the emptiness of...
When the temperature is just right, and the sky is clear, you can see some amazing phenomenon from the Sun. It isn’t your eyes playing a trick on you, it just means you’re seeing the right conditions for a really amazing experience. Sun Dogs, known scientifically as Parhelia, typically appear as two bright patches on either side of the Sun. Occasionally they reveal rainbow colours in their pattern, but can be quite bright. They are most easily visible when the Sun is low in the sky. Sun Dogs are made from the refraction of ice crystals in the upper atmosphere....
As the Kepler Space Telescope continues work on its second mission, the slow trickle of new exoplanet discoveries has begun. In the past few weeks scientists working with Kepler data have been able to identify new planets, and of course the variation continues to surprise us all. Most Recently, Kepler discovered a system of three planets orbiting the nearby red dwarf star EPIC 201367065, which is about half the size and mass of the Sun. The planets are all super-Earths, being only 2.1, 1.7, and 1.5 times the size of Earth and receiving 10.5, 3.2 and 1.4 times the light intensity of Earth...
Panspermia. Look it up. It sounds more like science fiction than science fact, but imagine the implications. It is the idea that life is everywhere, and is seeded throughout the universe by comets, asteroids, meteors, rogue planets, and even spacecraft, by way of unintended contamination of microbes. It could also explain why there is life on Earth. Because we still know so little about the Universe around us, panspermia is considered a plausible scenario. To test parts of this theory, a team from the University of Zurich’s Institute of Anatomy used small pipettes to actually place double stranded DNA on the outside of...
It’s true, Mars just had what we call a Meteor Storm. This is an event that, on Earth, only happens once every few hundred years, and the one that Mars just had was more intense than anything Earth has experienced in recorded history. This event happened because of a close Martian fly-by of comet C/2013 A1 Sliding Spring. On October 19th around 2:30pm EDT the comet came within 140,000 Km of Mars. This is incredibly close in Astronomical terms, being less than half the distance to the Moon and comparable to the total distance I’ve driven my car in the...
