It’s always nice to know that amazing science is being done in local institutions. Here in Ontario, Canada, we have 24 universities, and I had the pleasure of attending two of them, giving me a first hand look at the day to day work of astronomers. It certainly helped me realize how hard scientists work to get one simple result that the public will only care about for a day or two. About 95% of the work, from grant writing to data acquisition to data reduction to analysis and interpretation, is behind the scenes, and the final 5%, the result,...
The Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR) started out as static in a communications lab in New Jersey where it was discovered by Penzias and Wilson in 1964. Since then it has proven to be an extremely powerful tool for determining the structure and age of the Universe. It helps us constrain cosmological models, gives us insight into the inflationary period of the Universe, and tells us where to look for the largest and smallest structures of the Universe. The temperature fluctuations seen in the CMBR are so small they can only be quantified in millionths of a degree. Yet these...
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,...
100,000 Galaxies. Each one contains Billions upon Billions of stars. Each star could have planets, leading to countless possibilities of variation and the potential for life. But would we see the signs of civilization from Earth? Could a highly advanced civilization control the entire population of stars in their galaxy and harness that energy for their industry? Would they alter their stellar environment enough that we could see them? This is exactly the line of questioning that led astronomers to look at over 100,000 different nearby galaxies in mid-infrared emission to see some potential signs of Alien life. In these...
Globular Clusters are tightly packed collections of hundreds of thousands of very old stars, spherically distributed around the Milky Way Galaxy. They undergo little change, have nearly no gas, and have a stellar density way higher than the rest of the Galaxy. The first one discovered, in 1665, is messier 22, one of the most well studied, easily visible, and interesting globular clusters. Based on observations, this globular cluster contains at least two black holes. It is also one of only three globular clusters ever found to host a planetary nebula, a gaseous shell emitted by a dying star with...
Have you ever heard of an object called ‘Hanny’s Voorwerp?’ It’s a thin wispy ghost-like blob at the edge of a Galaxy. It was discovered by Dutch schoolteacher Hanny van Arkel in 2007 as she was classifying galaxies as part of the Galaxy Zoo project. Since then, astronomers have been studying its origin, as it was the first of a brand new phenomenon in astronomy. This past week, a new data set of wispy trails at the edge of Galaxies have been released as part of a Hubble study by Bill Keel of the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. The new Hubble...
The deeper we peer through the cosmos, the more we are looking into the distant past. Light from other galaxies takes millions of years to reach us, and so when that light has finally arrived at Earth, it is millions of years old, a snapshot in time of the distant galaxy. The furthest we can see is so far back in the history of the universe, that galaxies haven’t even formed yet. As we look at the large-scale structure of the Universe, we see it filled with a cosmic web of galaxy clusters, containing tens of thousands of galaxies each....
We call it dark matter because it doesn’t give off light, right? Well there is a lot of matter than doesn’t radiate, but the difference is that whatever the stuff is that we call dark matter doesn’t interact with anything through the small-scale fundamental forces. The only way we have been able to detect it’s presence is through large-scale gravitational interaction. Dark matter is ‘dark’ because it doesn’t interact with anything in a way that lets us figure out what it’s made of. Well now that we’ve got that out of the way, we can look at the new...
The observations of our galaxy throughout history have told us that our Milky Way is roughly 100,000 light years across. A number confirmed time and time again by scientists with better and better instruments. But recently a team from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, USA, published a paper challenged that idea, saying the galaxy is much bigger, up to 150,000 light years in diameter. They used the Sloan Digital Sky Survey’s (SDSS) data to look at the distribution of stars outward from the centre of the galaxy, in reference the the galactic plane. They discovered that the stellar distributions oscillated...
Even I was blown away when I saw this image a friend sent me. Gravitational lensing is a rare occurrence, and a supernova is a rare occurrence, so to see a supernova in a gravitationally lensed galaxy deep within the universe is exceptional. So exceptional that it was spotted for the first time ever in a Hubble image of the distant universe. That dot in the image is a single supernova in a very distant galaxy, split into four images by the gravitational lensing of the galaxy cluster in front of it. But there is also a secondary lensing effect from...
