Some days at work, when I am in the Space hall at the Ontario Science Center, I take a close look at the golf-ball-sized Moon rock we have on display. I think about how this rock was brought back on an Apollo mission over 40 years ago, how it had been an untouched part of the Moon for Billions of years before this, and how it has taught us so much about how the Moon, and subsequently the Earth, formed. But now it’s time for a new generation of Moon rocks to be analyzed, and China is in the nation...
Not long ago, the Curiosity rover started taking pictures of a fascinating region near mount Sharp that was soon named the Bagnold Dunes. Dark, sandy, and full of interesting features, the dunes are along the road that Curiosity has to travel before reaching the base of mount Sharp and beginning it’s ascent. Study of the dunes has revealed major differences from dunes on Earth, and they have Astronomers and Geologists alike asking some interesting questions. The more I see photos of Mars, the more I realize that it’s a lot like Earth. It has such diverse features and interesting landscapes,...
Massive stars and low-mass stars live different lives. They are born in different environments, fuse different elements during the course of their lives, release different amounts of radiation across the electromagnetic spectrum, die in different ways, and enrich interstellar space with different metals. We see stars at all stages of life in the galaxy, and their study allows us to piece together how stars form, and how the rarest ones are different. The image above shows two distinct clouds, both about 5,000 light years away in the constellation Cygnus, along the Galactic plane. The smaller bubble on the left, literally...
What do other planetary systems look like? We have seen some where massive Jupiter-sized worlds orbit closer to their star than Mercury does to the Sun, baking them with radiation. Others have had multiple rocky planets within the Earth’s orbit distance. Some have planets similar to Earth in a variety of locations. But what about far away from the star? We never expected to find gas giants like Uranus and Neptune in the far reaches of our solar system. Are there planetary systems where planets live even farther away? Maybe there are planets that live in the empty darkness between stars,...
Inhabited entirely by robots, Mars is the enigmatic planet that is under intense exploration by humanity. The curiosity rover has been making it’s way closer to Mount Sharp in the Gale Crater, intending to slowly climb the mountain, sampling rocks from different eras in Mars’ history along the way. One of the last regions to cross before beginning its ascent is the region known as the Bagnold dunes, strange dark features similar to sand dunes on Earth. Photos from Curiosity show the beauty and detail in the dark features. The dark dunes have very interesting ripple features, similar to those...
How do stars lose mass? For a star like the Sun, it shoots out a swath of charged particles into space and sheds mass at a rate of 4 million tons per second! Though even at this rate, the Sun only loses 1% of its total mass every 160 Billion years, so it’s not disappearing anytime soon. For more massive stars, the process can become complex and strange. The red hypergiant VY Canis Majoris, one of the largest known stars, is about 40 times as massive as the Sun, but humungous in scale. If this star were to replace the...
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...
Some of the most gorgeous, ghostly, and variable objects in the universe are planetary nebulae. They are all formed in a similar process, as a low-mass star (like our Sun) sheds it’s outer layers of gas and dust, heating them to a glow as they disperse over hundreds of millions of years. A few Billion years from now, the Sun will undergo the same major state change. When this happens, perhaps other species in the far future will gaze upon it and marvel at its beauty. One of the difficulties in studying a planetary nebula is measuring it’s distance from...
It’s that wonderful time of year again, when Halloween passes, and Christmas commercials dictate the airwaves. I’m still in the tolerant stages of hearing bells ringing in commercials, where they remind me that the northern hemisphere is once again treated to a familiar sight. The return of the Orion nebula! In reality, it didn’t go anywhere. Earth’s predictable motion around the Sun means that Northern Hemisphere observers see the sky gradually appear to move a bit further West each night. This is the time of year when Orion rises around 9pm, making it easily visible by midnight. I consider midnight...
192 Gigabytes. One picture. And I thought the 4 GB Andromeda shot was impressive (okay it still is). But this shot of the Milky Way, the largest single astronomical image ever compiled, is truly staggering in its detail. Showing multiple images taken with different filters, the massive compilation is the culmination of a 5-year observing program by the Ruhr-Universität Bochum. It’s amazing how much detail is shown, as you zoom in across the different features and truly get a sense for the magnitude of our Galaxy, and for the massive population of stars. I have yet to find a way to...
