Hubble just discovered the newest moon in the solar system, a tiny rock orbiting the dwarf planet Makemake, far beyond the orbit of Neptune. The new moon is about 250 Km across, compared to the 1,400 Km wide Makemake. It orbits in approximately 12 days, and has an edge on orbit, making it difficult to spot. “Our preliminary estimates show that the moon’s orbit seems to be edge-on, and that means that often when you look at the system you are going to miss the moon because it gets lost in the bright glare of Makemake,” said Alex Parker of...
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...
Welcome to a new series of posts that will characterize 1000 amazing facts about the Universe. There is so much out there that we have yet to learn, and every day, astronomers across the globe are using their research to reveal the deepest secrets of the cosmos. This series will look at the strangest, coolest, most exciting facts that we have discovered in hundreds of years of modern science. Fact #4: Most of the stars in the universe are red dwarfs smaller than our Sun. There is a leap of understanding that happens when a child learns that our Sun...
They may look like they are standing still, but galaxies are all spinning. Spiral galaxies have the lovely regular spin of a disk, while elliptical galaxies are all over the place, a buzzing hive of stars. We don’t see this rotation in real time because it takes millions of years for it to be noticeable. The Milky Way takes 250 Million years to spin just once around it’s axis. Looking at this rotation rate vs. distance from the galactic center was what originally led to the discovery of dark matter. Some galaxies do in fact spin slower than others, but how does...
Is this a giant hole in space? I show a picture similar to this as I ask this question to students and audiences that I host in my planetarium. Most people answer that it is a black hole, or dark matter, or dark energy, or something strange like that. But the amazing thing is that it is actually a thick cloud of dust that is opaque, letting no visible light from the distant stars pass through. The funny thing is that the cloud is transparent in infrared light, but in the visible spectrum it highlights something interesting about the universe:...
The Andromeda Galaxy is the closest large spiral to our own Milky Way, and the only major Galaxy moving toward us. Turns out its on a direct collision course, but we still have 3.5 Billion years to prepare, so its not exactly pressing news. On the plus side, studying Andromeda allows us to infer properties of more distant galaxies, and it gives us a map of what our own Milky Way Galaxy may look like. Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have discovered a giant halo of gas around Andromeda, and the Milky Way may have a similar one. By...
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,...
There is a loose hierarchy of the cosmos that repeats. Stars form clusters, and then galaxies. Galaxies form clusters, and then these form clusters of their own, called superclusters. Gravity dominates the structure of such collections, yet all we feel and see from Earth is a relatively homogeneous distribution of stars. How do we see this hierarchy? If we zoom in, looking at a patch of sky so tiny that we can’t see any stars, what do we see? This patch of sky is about the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length, and if we point the...
Every single massive galaxy has a black hole at its center, and bigger galaxies have bigger black holes. It almost seems like a natural progression, with a bigger galaxy meaning more stars and material to feed a bigger black hole. However, most of that material doesn’t make it to the central black hole. So how does a massive galaxy with hundreds of billions of stars spread out over hundreds of thousands of light years contribute to a black hole that at most is solar system sized? The answer might lie in another elusive and enigmatic gem of the universe: Dark...
