It’s been nine months since NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft flew past Pluto. Time sure does fly. And even though the spacecraft is moving further from Pluto and Earth, it’s still sending back the massive amounts of data it gathered during closest approach. As this data is received, the huge team of scientists that are part of the mission use it to characterize Pluto so humanity can begin to understand just how strange the distant dwarf Planet is. Five new papers characterize some of the latest science done on the enigmatic world. Here’s a quick summary of each: The first paper from...
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...
Type 1a supernova explosions are used by Astronomers as a standard candle for measuring distances in Astronomy. They all explode with the same intrinsic brightness, and so depending on their apparent magnitude, ie how bright they look, we can determine the distance to them. It’s like a 40 watt light bulb. No matter how far away I move it, it’s still 40 watts, even though it looks dimmer if it’s further away. However, a few months ago some research came forward about type 1a supernova explosions, hinting that there may actually be two or more distinct types with slightly different...
By now, if you keep up with Astronomy news even a little bit, you’ve heard of the strange white spot on the surface of Ceres, within a large crater in the dwarf planet’s northern hemisphere. As the science mission of the Dawn spacecraft continues, we are starting to see new images of the surface in unprecedented detail, and finally we have a closer view of the mystery spot. Is the new series of images enough to determine its origin? See for yourself. The only thing clear from these new images is that what once appeared to be a single or...
The Milky Way Galaxy has about 26 associated satellite galaxies, which is strange to imagine, since we think of a galaxy as a massive collection of Billions of stars. The dwarf galaxies are not easily visible since they are small, so they tend to blend in with the background of Milky Way stars that are much closer. You might also notice from the above image that the dwarf galaxies are distant, lying beyond the 100,000 light year scope of our large spiral home. Most of them likely originated in the turmoil of protogalaxy collisions that occurred billions of years...
