Gold doesn’t come from your local jewelry store, and the Gold rush that occurred in the Yukon territory at the turn of the 20th century is not the source I’m talking about either. I want to take it further back, to the origins of gold the element. Similar to the origins of most other elements on the periodic table, it requires an immense amount of energy, such as the nuclear fusion that goes on within a star. But Gold can not be made by a star’s thermonuclear engine. Gold requires more energy, as does every other element heavier than Iron. So...
The elements that make up our world and our selves, where do they come from? Sure there is plenty of Oxygen in the air, Silicon and Carbon are just lying around, and a bunch of other stuff can be found across our planet. but where did they come from originally? We know that most of the elements are synthesized within stars, but which ones aren’t? Which ones are made in a lab? The Big Bang gave rise to the first elements Hydrogen and Helium, which eventually clumped together to form the first stars and star producing the heavier stuff. Lithium,...
The Past: Mars has water, and it used to have a lot more. If modern Mars had the ocean it once had, it would evaporate off into space quickly because there is no heavy atmosphere to help keep it pressurized and in liquid form. Mars would have had a thicker atmosphere in addition to it’s magnetic field in order to keep all that water in one place. So where did the atmosphere go? And if there was such a thick atmosphere, how does it account for the fingerprint of excess Carbon-13 and a lack of Carbon-12 found on the red planet...
A few hundred million years after the big bang, the first stars formed. We aren’t exactly sure how, but we do know that they contained Hydrogen, Helium, and a little bit of Lithium. These were the only elements in the entire universe at the time. Within these first stars, the fusion of heavier elements began. Oxygen, Nitrogen, Carbon, Iron, and all the other elements that make up everything we know formed Billions of years ago in these first stars and in their progenitors. It was a slow process to produce these elements and seed them throughout the cosmos, but over...
One of the greatest scientific discoveries of all time came with the invention of the spectroscope by Joseph Von Fraunhofer in 1814. It enabled us to look out at the universe and realize that the same basic building blocks that made you and I and all other life, were the same things that make up everything else in the cosmos. The tiny atoms in our bodies all started out at the center of a massive star billions of years ago. So naturally, when we talk about the odds of life forming elsewhere, we have to include a study of where...
The Sun. A bright fiery light in the sky to some, worshipped as a god by others, seen as a massive ball of hydrogen plasma 150 million kilometres away by scientists. Once in a while, the Sun goes ahead and releases massive amounts of charged plasma particles toward the Earth. The particles should eradicate humanity with horrible burns and render our planet lifeless, but luckily… they don’t. Why? The Earth’s magnetic field protects us, funnelling the particles to the poles where they ionize gases in the atmosphere and become harmless. The bonus for humanity, aside from not dying, is that we...
Think about Earth and its population of over 7 Billion people. That’s 7 Billion people who wake up, breathe, live, think, experience, and interact with each other. The sheer volume of interactions and variation in the human experience is staggering. Every second you are alive these interactions are happening all around you, and far from you in any corner of the planet. Millions of people right now feel sad, happy, ecstatic, broken, angry, tired, energetic, and everything in between. Now if we go beyond to the Milky Way, where there are more than 50 stars for each and every homo sapiens on...
Astronomers save up some of their best science for conferences. When all of their friends and colleagues get together it can be a big opportunity to show off and impress the titans of the field. This is why big astronomy meetings generate a lot of science news. This is the third or fourth story I’ve posted about the proceedings at the Royal Astronomical Society’s National meeting this week, and the good science just keeps coming in. Although I had strong opinions about a declaration of potential life on Comet 67P earlier this week, a story from the same meeting, I...
If there’s one difference I notice between Science and Religion, it’s that when questions come up and something unexpected flies in the face of a well-established principle, Science gets excited, Religion gets defensive. I’m always on the lookout for new data that causes us to rethink the ideas we have, and when I find something, I get excited because it means we’ve found something that has been elusive for a long time. Isaac Asimov said it best: The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny…’ – Isaac Asimov...
Mercury, the smallest planet in the solar system, and closest to the Sun, is only a little bit bigger than Earth’s Moon. But the Moon is comparatively reflective object. Mercury is thought to be made of the same rock as the Moon, so what is the difference? Why do objects in our Solar system have different brightnesses? The key is in a property called albedo. It’s basically how much light an object reflects, measured as a fraction. For example, the Moon reflects 12% of the light the Sun shines on it, so it has an albedo of 0.12. The albedo...
