Cryovolcano is a cool word, literally and figuratively. You hear about it a lot when talking about solar system moons like Enceladus, and it’s one of those words that would make a heck of a great Hollywood disaster movie title, like ‘Sharknado’ or ‘Armageddon.’ I do not, however, endorse either of those movies, they were both terrible. At any rate, a real cryovolcano seems like an interesting thing. It’s a volcano in the sense that it looks a little like a mountain and spews out material when the pressure builds from beneath the surface, but it’s not your traditional Earth-like volcano...
Black holes are the most extreme phenomena known in the universe. They are the absolute limit of what gravity and space-time can be twisted into. It’s no surprise that some of the most massive and advanced telescopes in the world are tasked with studying their properties and how they interact with their environment. But maybe there’s a way for you and I to see what a black hole can do, and all we need is a moderate 8 inch telescope and our eyes! Even though black holes generally give off tons of radiation, we need to observe them in the...
In the early universe, there was a huge amount of swirling matter and light that didn’t really have much structure. Compared to today’s much more regular dotting of galaxy clusters and superclusters, the early universe was all over the place. But as will all things, there had to be a first. a first star, a first galaxy, and even a first galaxy cluster. The massive cluster of galaxies known as IDCS J1426.5+3508 is the most distant massive galaxy cluster ever discovered, and it has some interesting properties that point to how it formed and evolved so quickly. One such property is...
If you actually had the ability to see X-Rays, the world around you would look pretty boring. Actually it would be invisible, since nothing around you gives off X-rays. You might be able to see an imaging device if you live or work near a medical office, but that’s about it. If you looked at the night sky, you would see many interesting sources of X-Ray light, mostly from active black holes in our own galaxy and beyond. Recently a high-resolution scan of the Andromeda Galaxy revealed a plethora of sources, showing where black holes and neutron stars are feeding...
Gas giants, like Jupiter, Saturn, or some of the largest exoplanets, are mostly made of Hydrogen gas. The simplest and most abundant element in the universe, Hydrogen easily reacts to form compounds, especially at higher temperatures, making it hard to contain and work with. It’s essential to understand how it behaves across a range of temperatures and pressures so that we can understand the interiors of stars and planets. But there may also be applications closer to home, like the white whale of materials science, a room temperature superconductor. A team of researchers from Osaka University and Tokyo Institute of...
Massive stars and low-mass stars live different lives. They are born in different environments, fuse different elements during the course of their lives, release different amounts of radiation across the electromagnetic spectrum, die in different ways, and enrich interstellar space with different metals. We see stars at all stages of life in the galaxy, and their study allows us to piece together how stars form, and how the rarest ones are different. The image above shows two distinct clouds, both about 5,000 light years away in the constellation Cygnus, along the Galactic plane. The smaller bubble on the left, literally...
What do other planetary systems look like? We have seen some where massive Jupiter-sized worlds orbit closer to their star than Mercury does to the Sun, baking them with radiation. Others have had multiple rocky planets within the Earth’s orbit distance. Some have planets similar to Earth in a variety of locations. But what about far away from the star? We never expected to find gas giants like Uranus and Neptune in the far reaches of our solar system. Are there planetary systems where planets live even farther away? Maybe there are planets that live in the empty darkness between stars,...
How do stars lose mass? For a star like the Sun, it shoots out a swath of charged particles into space and sheds mass at a rate of 4 million tons per second! Though even at this rate, the Sun only loses 1% of its total mass every 160 Billion years, so it’s not disappearing anytime soon. For more massive stars, the process can become complex and strange. The red hypergiant VY Canis Majoris, one of the largest known stars, is about 40 times as massive as the Sun, but humungous in scale. If this star were to replace the...
Some of the most gorgeous, ghostly, and variable objects in the universe are planetary nebulae. They are all formed in a similar process, as a low-mass star (like our Sun) sheds it’s outer layers of gas and dust, heating them to a glow as they disperse over hundreds of millions of years. A few Billion years from now, the Sun will undergo the same major state change. When this happens, perhaps other species in the far future will gaze upon it and marvel at its beauty. One of the difficulties in studying a planetary nebula is measuring it’s distance from...
It’s that wonderful time of year again, when Halloween passes, and Christmas commercials dictate the airwaves. I’m still in the tolerant stages of hearing bells ringing in commercials, where they remind me that the northern hemisphere is once again treated to a familiar sight. The return of the Orion nebula! In reality, it didn’t go anywhere. Earth’s predictable motion around the Sun means that Northern Hemisphere observers see the sky gradually appear to move a bit further West each night. This is the time of year when Orion rises around 9pm, making it easily visible by midnight. I consider midnight...
