Jupiter has aurora. It’s not surprising since it has a very powerful magnetic field. It’s only natural that the two largest structures in the solar system, the Sun’s solar wind influence (called the heliosphere) and Jupiter’s magnetosphere, should be constantly battling. But don’t expect to see Jupiter’s aurora through a backyard telescope. The result of this battle is far more energetic, producing an aurora invisible to the human eye, one made of X-rays. The Sun constantly blasts charged particles off into space in all directions, assaulting the planets, moons, and other solar system bodies. It is this blast of solar wind that gives...
We just saw it. Another record breaker. This incredible explosion of a massive dying star is the brightest supernova ever observed. You may think you get how big this explosion was, but it was brighter than collective brightness of all the 400 Billion stars in the Milky Way. You may be asking why you can’t see it in the sky. Well even though it is incredibly bright, it is 3.8 Billion light years away in a distant galaxy, so the discovery needed a huge telescope. It may have been powered by a rare star called a magnetar, a star with such an...
Categorizing objects in the universe can be difficult. The fiasco with Pluto over the last decade is more than proof of that. We generally look to location and then to size as the two main methods for classifying the stuff that permeates the cosmos. Galaxies contain stars, which host orbiting planets, which host orbiting moons; While asteroids fly in between planets and icy comets are wander through the outskirts of star systems. But what about the in-between objects? Often we find strange things in strange places. There are moons in our solar system that are larger than planets. What would...
Move over Saturn, J1407b has rings that are far more spectacular than anyone would have imagined. This distant ‘planet’ (It may not actually be a planet) orbits an orange star 117 light-years away in the constellation Centaurus, and has a ring system consisting of 30 separate rings, each of which could be tens of Millions of Kilometres wide. In Spring of 2007, while monitoring the light from the star, astronomers noticed that the star was being eclipsed multiple times to varying degrees. This led the team, consisting of astronomers from Leiden Observatory and the University of Rochester, to conclude that...
