With the recent discovery of gravitational waves, we now have a target for probing the very early universe, close to the big bang. This is because gravitational waves can travel across the universe unimpeded, meaning those created after the big bang are still bouncing around today. It’s like the big bang was the ringing of a giant bell, and the ringing can still be heard. But all of our Easter eggs are not in one basket. There is another way to probe the very early universe, one we haven’t found yet, because it involves particles that are very tiny and...
In 2014, comet C/2013 A1, known as sliding spring, came within 140,000 Km of the planet Mars. This is a bit more than a third of the distance from the Earth to the Moon. Comets are small, so gravitationally this interaction was insignificant, but from an electromagnetic point of view, things were shaken up big time! Comets are small, relatively speaking. A typical comet is a few kilometers across, about the size of a big city. But with sunlight melting ices and liberating gases and dust from the comet’s interior, the part of the comet we see in the sky,...
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...
It takes a long time for things to change in the Universe. Time takes on an entirely different role when it comes to the lives of planets, stars, and galaxies. A million years in the life of a star or planet is the equivalent of a single day in the life of a human being. Human lifetimes come and go while stars and planets stay pretty much the same. However, just like human lives, where many days can build up to an important event, millions of years of lead-up can produce some incredible changes to a planet or star. New...
We know that the giant bright light in the sky that keeps us warm is so much more than we can see. A star, like countless others in the sky, close enough to outshine all of them. The Sun is a dynamic object, endlessly churning and burping plasma beyond it’s boundaries into the solar system and beyond. NASA spacecraft and ground-based telescopes have been keeping eyes on the Sun for years to characterize its 11-year magnetic cycle. And every so often they have a front-row seat to the massive blasts that just can’t be seen with human eyes. The first...
When we see the Earth’s only Moon up in the sky, we often think about how small it is. It’s only about 1/4 the diameter of the Earth, and at a distance of 384,000 Km, it looks small in the sky. But often size is entirely a matter of perspective. What we compare something to, that’s what determines it’s size. When the Moon is high in the sky we easily compare it to the size of the window we are looking through, or to a nearby tree, or our outstretched hand. All of this can make the Moon seem pretty tiny....
Looking at the universe in radio waves is a fascinating sight. For one, the radio sky is very weak; If you placed your cellphone on the Moon facing back at Earth, it would be brighter than all other radio sources in the entire sky by a factor of a million. But as with every other part of the electromagnetic spectrum, it has scientific value in studying the sky. Over the past decade, astronomers have been identifying several Fast Radio Bursts (FRB), short bursts of radio waves from different places in the universe that last for a few short seconds. These are...
I decided to take my own personal leap day on writing about the leap day. Partly due to being busy at work, and partly due to lack of mental faculties. All that aside, it’s only another 1,459 days until the next leap day, so we better start preparing. A leap year occurs because the solar system seems to slightly disagree with the way we manage time. Earth’s trip around the Sun, a year, doesn’t take exactly 365 days each lasting 24 hours. It takes a bit longer. A year is actually 8,765 hours, or 525,949 minutes, which is 365 days, 5...
Planet nine from outer space has yet to be found, but the theory is sound, and the hunt has begun. Since the announcement by Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown on January 20th, astronomers have been finding ways to search for the theorized planet, using all the available data to zero in on it’s position. It’s certainly big enough to find, at roughly 10 Earth masses, but with a huge swath of space to search, everything that excludes part of the search area is a step in the right direction. One of the ongoing goals of researchers is to carefully calculate...
