Lurking in the depths of a galaxy, hidden from human eyes, lie millions of monsters. They could swallow you up in an instant, sealing you off from the outside world and devouring you atom by atom. This sounds like your typical Hollywood monster movie, but with millions of black holes hidden throughout the galaxy, its more real than you might think. Supermassive black holes, the largest ones that reside at the centers of galaxies, are much easier to see. They are devouring gas and dust rapidly, resulting in bright emission across the electromagnetic spectrum, especially in x-rays. For many galaxies,...
When the Rosetta spacecraft entered orbit around comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, first images captured deep circular depressions among the other surface features. Now that the orbiter has taken significant observations of the comet’s surface, the science team has concluded that these depressions are actually sinkholes that form by the same processes that form sinkholes 500 Million kilometers away here on Earth. Sinkholes on Earth form when subsurface material is eroded away. Though not initially visible on the surface, the material falls deep underground leaving a circular cavern. Once enough material has eroded away, the top of the cavern collapses, leaving a large...
The Rosetta orbiter lies in a vast empty space, inhabited only by its orbital companion – a 4 Km wide ball of ice and dust, spitting out gases and other material as it is warmed by the Sun’s rays. It’s next mission milestone comes on August 13th, 2015, when the duo reaches perihelion, the closest point to the Sun in their orbit. It will be the first time a spacecraft has the opportunity to study the outgassing and behaviour of a comet as it orbits close to the Sun. So far the comet 67P/ Churyumov-Gerasimenko has been slowly increasing in...
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...
The Moon has clearly seen some stuff. It’s visibly heavily cratered across it’s surface, which has remained unchanged since it’s surface solidified 4.2 Billion years ago. Think about that – the Moon has been the same, with the exception of cratering, for 4 Billion years. This is a stark contrast to the Earth, whose erosion and tectonic activity cause the crust to change on scales of a few hundred million years. Astronomers have worked hard to learn about the early solar system by looking at the Moon and its cratering patterns. Most of the visible craters on the Moon are...
One of the largest and brightest star clusters in the Milky Way galaxy is the Arches cluster, and its easy to see why. Lying only 100 light years away from the supermassive black hole that lies in the heart of our galaxy, it formed in an incredibly dense environment. It lies 25,000 light years from Earth in the constellation Sagittarius, and contains thousands of massive stars, including 160 that are hot, young, and exceptionally more massive than the Sun. Only 1 in 10 Million stars in the galaxy are as bright as these massive central 160 stars. Though it is...
Of the approximately 100 Million galaxies in the visible universe, we see incredible variation. We always try to classify them based on their shape, size, and peak radiation, but even then we still find others that stray from the usual patterns. In recent years, a new class of galaxies named Extremely Luminous Infrared Galaxies (ELIRGs) has been found with data from the Wide Field Infrared Survey (WISE). Now the king of the ELIRGs has been found, the most luminous galaxy in the universe. The galaxy, designated WISE J224607.57-052635.0, has a luminosity equal to 300 Trillion suns, and may owe its brightness...
It has been well established that Galaxies have formed during the last 13.7 Billion years of cosmic evolution. They didn’t just pop into existence, but developed in a long and arduous process that spans immense time. Many of them will continue to flourish for many Billions of years. If Galaxies do indeed have a birth, as has been seen, it stands to reason that they should someday ‘die’ as well. But have we ever seen the death of a galaxy? Have we ever seen the end for a massive collective structure of stars? We have seen galaxies collide and merge...
When the first stars and galaxies started to form, it was like a spark of a massive chain reaction where the vast amounts of gas and dust that had clumped together were quickly converted into dense, luminous star clusters. This was the beginning of the formation of the heavier elements that would eventually make up all that we see on the planet Earth. But when did this massive tirade of star formation end? When we look at galaxies in the present epoch, most don’t form stars very rapidly at all, and giant elliptical galaxies are all but devoid of gas,...
As the inevitable launch of humans to Mars slowly approaches over the coming decades, we are using our best technology to study our neighbour in detail. With multiple orbiting satellites and ground surveyors, we are slowly learning more about the geology, climate, environment, and history of Mars. It feels as if every new discovery is a surprise, and we never expected Mars to be such a dynamic and complex world. With science and technology improving every year, humanity is focussing efforts on the red planet. The latest incredible discovery comes from radar data from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The...
