After a relatively long hiatus, I am back blogging. I am currently more than 22 posts behind my “post every day” goal, so expect some short and sweet posts to make up the difference. I’m not worried about it, because life gets busy, and we all have other priorities. But I’m glad to be back. A true love of Astronomy and Space will always keep me here, writing about the new and exciting science in a field I have loved my whole life. If you, reading this right now, are the only person who ever reads these words, I hope it adds...
Have you ever seen those amazing composite images that people will post, showing the same picture every day or every year for a long period of time. We see how children age, how people transform their bodies, and how their day to day experiences, though seemingly small, add up to incredible changes as the years go by. I personally love time-lapse photography, representing a long period of time in a shorter instance. For me the beauty is showing those changes that are subtle in human experience and communicating them in a way that shows how significant they are when we...
Let me ask you, when you look at the stars on a cold, clear night, what do you see? Diamonds sparkling? Shapes? I do see those things, but I also see so much more. When I look at the stars, I see a thousand generations of humans looking up in wonder, writing shapes in the dirt and telling incredible stories of brave heroes, ferocious beasts, and important lessons. I see our common ancestors using the sky to predict the weather, the seasons, and even the coming of the end of the world. They were looking at a comet in the...
The Milky Way is a decently big Galaxy. At 100,000 light years across, it is a full size barred spiral galaxy and distinctly different from what we would call ‘dwarf galaxies.’ But there are much larger galaxies in the universe. Most reside near the centre of a massive galaxy cluster and are the result of Billions of years of mergers and collisions. But some appear large because of their incredibly powerful release of energy. A new Galaxy discovered in the early universe by a team of astronomers from the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics is an incredible 4 million light years...
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 Earth, along with the rest of the solar system, was born around 4.6 Billion years ago. At that time, Earth was part of the early group of habitable planets to form in the Universe. According to a new theoretical study from the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), the vast majority of Earth-like planets has yet to form. Using data from the Hubble space Telescope (HST) and the Kepler Space Telescope (KST), astronomers were able to come up with a theoretical model of cosmic evolution, detailing how planets will form over the entire lifespan of the Universe. “Our main motivation was...
Some colour images were released from New Horizons today, showing some of the first true colour views of the icy dwarf planet. The amazing thing is that to human eyes, the combination of Methane and Nitrogen in the atmosphere give it a gorgeous blue tinge. The other amazing piece of news is that Pluto has water ice on its surface! Check out these photos highlighted for surface water ice. By looking for the signature of Sunlight reflected off water, the cameras on New Horizons can spot regions where water ice is dominant. Pluto continues to surprise!
When the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope comes a few years from now, we will have then opportunity to probe deeper into the cosmos than ever before, to see things we had only dreamed of seeing previously. Among the prime targets for this modern marvel of human ingenuity are potentially habitable exoplanets, where future humans could live, provided there isn’t already life occupying the real estate. To help astronomers assign importance to the growing number of exoplanets, researchers at the University of Washington’s Virtual Planetary Laboratory have devised an index to represent the habitability of worlds, near and...
Are equations beautiful? Does a mathematician see the machine code of the universe in the complex language they use? Does a Chemist see the flow of matter? Does a Biologist see the evolution of life? Does a physicist see the probabilistic nature of electrons? Many scientists would affirm their view that the equations that dictate their respective fields are artistic, in addition to logical. So if equations can be beautiful, what is the most beautiful equation? Naturally, the most beautiful equation should be simple. It should be somewhat intuitive, yet surprising in it’s result. It should explain something fundamental about the universe,...
I promised my friend Dash I would use the term ‘Apoceclipse’ to describe last night’s Perigee Harvest Moon Lunar Eclipse, so here it is! Last night was great fun, even though I couldn’t see the event at all due to cloud cover. Here’s why. It all started with a media blitz and a crazy day at the Science Centre. I started off by doing a Global News interview in the morning, and then a 680 news phone in around lunchtime. I had a planetarium show, and then it was off to CBC downtown to do the national news live! It...
