When I report science news, discuss new discoveries, and get excited about new results, it can be difficult to hear that little voice in the back of my mind that says ‘reproducible results.’ It’s the voice of the pure scientist that reminds me to be critical of the things I read, and be open to critical review for the things I write and say. Any result isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on unless it can be independently reproduced. This is a key to scientific advancement. If the result can’t be reproduced, then something is wrong. It may be an error with...
It hasn’t been found yet – let me make that clear. But with evidence that it should exist, astronomers are looking more closely at the proposed planet nine and how it might have formed, and how it could have ended up in such a distant orbit. When you start to think about how a planet ten times the mass of Earth could have ended up more than ten times as far from the Sun as Neptune, a few scenarios pop into mind: It was formed in the inner solar system, where interactions with gas giants or another star pulled it out It formed...
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...
One of the most fascinating things happens whenever I show someone the planet Mercury in the sky. Their first reaction is to be surprised at how bright it is. Most people think of Mercury as a faraway planet, too close to the Sun to see at all. But in reality, Mercury is close to Earth, and when the angles are just right, it’s not hard to find. Mercury is 57 million kilometers from the Sun, more than a third of the way to Earth. We are also much closer to Mercury than we are to Jupiter and Saturn. When we see the...
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...
Gamma rays are the most powerful form of electromagnetic radiation in the universe. With wavelengths as small at atoms, they usually result from the most powerful interactions known, such as the collision of two particles, or the release of energy from the accretion disk of a black hole. But there is another potential source of gamma rays that has not yet been confirmed: Dark Matter. The leading candidate for dark matter is the theorized Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP), though it is not as wimpy as its namesake suggests, making up 5 times as much mass as the visible matter...
With the recent story of the star with a debris ring potentially being a sign of extraterrestrial life (spoiler alert, it’s not aliens), I had to talk a bit more about debris rings in general around other stars. How can they exist? When we start to look at the number of worlds and the variability of objects and stars, it would be no surprise to find strange systems where recent interactions have produced all kinds of fascinating patterns. It’s another example of finding art in nature. A group of astronomers from the university of Warwick have directly imaged a debris...
I am always fascinated by the diversity of colours, shapes, and scenarios that pop up throughout our universe. Even though we can classify things into categories like ‘planetary nebula,’ ‘galaxy,’ ‘dwarf star,’ and such, there is still a huge amount of variability among these categories. The most diverse group may be nebulae, since their shape relies on what elements are present, the environment in which they formed, and how far along they are in their evolution. A great example of a strange and interesting nebula is the PN M2-9, the Twin Jet Nebula. Lying 5,560 light years away, in the...
When Charles Messier catalogued 100 different objects in the night sky, he couldn’t have imagined the richness and detail of each one of his individual discoveries, or that we would ever see them in such incredible detail as to understand what they truly are and how they evolve. But every time I see a new image of a well-known object, I not only see the new and amazing details revealed, I see the next level of technology that enables us to see it in a new light. This image of Messier number 64 gives me that view. Messier 64 is...
At one point in history, let’s say around 1994, astronomers were fairly confident in their understanding of the formation of planetary systems. Even though at the time we hadn’t found any planets orbiting other stars, they had long been theorized, and we figured that systems would form much like our own solar system. Rocky planets in the interior, gaseous giants further out, and a huge icy debris field at the outer edges. And then along came 51 Pegasi b. Half the mass of Jupiter, it orbits its star in only 4 days, far closer than Mercury. It was considered a...
