You have to see this incredible feature on Mars, showing some of the best High-Res photos and milestones from the mission. http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/12/09/science/space/curiosity-rover-28-months-on-mars.html As you look through the images, remember that you are looking at another world. It feels foreign, yet oddly familiar. You almost want to reach out and just grab a handful of sand. It makes you realize that we are not the center of the Universe. There are likely Billions of worlds similar to Mars, with Dunes and Soil and Skies and Mountains, except those world may not be so barren. They may be lush and alive, dominated...
One of the most important science goals of the Rosetta mission is to determine the conditions in the early solar system, as well as the element abundance and climate that led to the development of life on Earth. By studying a comet that has been isolated in Space for 4.5 Billion years, we can learn about the formation of the Solar System and the origin of the raw materials for life on Earth. The Earth was thought to be so warm when it formed that any water would have evaporated away into space. If so, where did our vast oceans come...
Space is Big. I say this often, but it is so vast we can’t even comprehend the emptiness of it. We see Billions upon Billions of stars, all taunting us with their shine, seemingly close but completely unreachable. How do we know which stars we should spend our time looking at? We don’t really have the time to scan through each star in detail, so what are the criteria for taking a closer look? Generally we look at a population of stars to gain an understanding of each life stage, and then we look at the oldest and youngest to determine...
About 170 years ago, a star nearly exploded in the Southern constellation Carina. I say nearly for a few reasons. On Earth, observers saw a dim, seemingly-average star become the second brightest star in the night sky. It stayed that way for 20 years before slowly fading. When we looked at it with telescopes, we found that whatever happened to Eta Carinae, it ejected more than 30 times the mass of our Sun in that short twenty year period, creating what we now call the homunculus nebula. Eta Carinae is a multiple star system 7500 light years away from Earth, so rest assured any...
Have you ever heard of the Van Allen belts? If not you really should learn about them. After all, without them the majority of life on Earth could not survive. So what are they and how do they keep us alive? The Van Allen Belts are a collection of charged particles, held in place by the magnetic field of Earth, that act as a barrier to prevent the most harmful radiation from the Sun from reaching the surface of the Earth. They shift according to the incoming energy of the Sun, and if there is a large enough swell of...
Twenty Years of exoplanet research has seen incredible advances in detecting planets orbiting distant stars, as well as their size, orbit period, orbit distance, and even atmospheric composition. But the next step in understanding exoplanets is to learn about their magnetic fields. We know that many exoplanets should have magnetic fields. It makes sense, since nearly every world in our own solar system has some sort of magnetism. But for the first time, an international team of Astronomers, led by Kristina Kislyakova of the Space Research Institute of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, have discovered a way to detect magnetic fields...
Vesta is the 2nd-largest Asteroid in the well known asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. 525 Km in diameter, it is very big for an asteroid. If it was much bigger we would call it a dwarf planet. The Dawn Spacecraft, launched in 2007, stopped by Vesta in 2011 and stuck with it until 2012 as it orbited the sun. We are still seeing the results of that rendezvous, and just recently NASA released a complete map of the surface features of Vesta. It’s amazing to see so many interesting surface features on such a small world. Geologic...
I’ve talked about black holes previously, and only in our own Galaxy, and only the big one in the middle, Sag A*. When I speak with the public and with kids about Black Holes, most people never really understand that there aren’t just one or two kicking around, but potentially there are as many as a Billion Black Holes in our own Galaxy! The problem is, we are not very good at finding them. It makes sense, they give off no light, and we can only find them through indirectly measuring their effects on the surrounding environment. We can sometimes see...
The sun is definitely hitting its usual ‘rebellious’ phase on its 11 year sunspot cycle, where it flares up at literally everything. The biggest sunspot observed in 24 years has been releasing huge amounts of energy, in the form of X-class solar flares. In the past week this sunspot, designated AR 12192, has released 3 X-class flares, including a huge X-3.1 on Friday. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) has been watching the light show. Okay so the Sun is blowing up, what does all this mean? Let’s start with Sunspots. A sunspot is a place on the sun where there...
Yesterday’s post had me discuss the partial Solar Eclipse that occurred around sunset for most of North America. The one thing I neglected to mention was regarding safe viewing of it. In reality if you saw the sun with your bare eyes during a partial eclipse, it looks like the sun any other time of day – its bright. Don’t damage your eyes. I found a bit of time in the afternoon to build a pinhole camera, which basically consists of a tube or box with a pinhole in one end and a film or ‘viewing area’ at the other...
