Our planet orbits the Sun. 365.25 days to go full circle (ellipse actually) and bring the seasons to Earth. But the Sun is not really stationary, it’s actually moving through space. It’s orbiting the center of the Milky Way, along with the rest of the galaxy. It actually has a periodic motion as it moves around the Galaxy, slowly moving up above the galactic plane then being pulled back down below by the disk stars. Currently, the Sun is moving toward the constellation Hercules at a speed of around 72,000 Km/h. It is also moving up to the top of the...
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,...
With the recent story of the star with a debris ring potentially being a sign of extraterrestrial life (spoiler alert, it’s not aliens), I had to talk a bit more about debris rings in general around other stars. How can they exist? When we start to look at the number of worlds and the variability of objects and stars, it would be no surprise to find strange systems where recent interactions have produced all kinds of fascinating patterns. It’s another example of finding art in nature. A group of astronomers from the university of Warwick have directly imaged a debris...
A few hundred million years after the big bang, the first stars formed. We aren’t exactly sure how, but we do know that they contained Hydrogen, Helium, and a little bit of Lithium. These were the only elements in the entire universe at the time. Within these first stars, the fusion of heavier elements began. Oxygen, Nitrogen, Carbon, Iron, and all the other elements that make up everything we know formed Billions of years ago in these first stars and in their progenitors. It was a slow process to produce these elements and seed them throughout the cosmos, but over...
Sometimes I love to say ‘I told you so,’ though in the world of science it’s more like ‘I gave you a high probability of this plausible scenario.’ A little while back a story broke about a star called KIC 8462852, with a strange ring of material surrounding it. One potential explanation was that an extraterrestrial civilization has constructed a giant ring to harvest it’s home star’s energy. Though this was one of a dozen possible explanations, it of course gathered the most steam among the general populace. In a statement today, officials from the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) confirmed that...
It always fascinates me to see videos and photographs from the International Space Station (ISS), how simple day to day activities are so altered because of the altered Physics of constant free fall in orbit around the Earth. Many of the videos are showing what people call the ‘effects of zero gravity.’ This is actually not the case. There is gravity in space. Let’s take a closer look at the situation of an ISS astronaut. If we do the math (I do realize the term ‘do the math’ turns away a lot of people, so I will keep it short),...
Now that New Horizons has passed by Pluto and it’s moons, it’s time we updated out images of the entire system. Taking images from New Horizons, today’s APOD shows the relative sizes of the moons with the best photos we have of them to date. Looking at the image, it makes sense that Nix and Hydra weren’t discovered until 2005, and that Kerberos and Styx were not found until 2012. The moons are so tiny and distant, and are dwarfed by the larger Charon and central Pluto. As far as we know, this is it for Pluto’s moons, since we haven’t...
News always reports the records. The biggest, the loudest, the fastest, the first. When it comes to Astronomy, there are so many new worlds to explore and so much new science to learn, we end up breaking records often. Even with Astronomy being the oldest science, the sheer amount of stuff in the universe means there is always something new and surprising to discover. Today’s episode of ‘Biggest, brightest, hottest’ brings us the move massive binary star system ever found, with two huge, hot stars so close together that they are actually touching, merging their atmospheres together. In the Large...
This past week, American astronaut Scott Kelly, currently on a one year stint aboard the International Space Station, broke the record of 363 days for most time logged in Space by an American. Kelly will continue to run up the tally, as he is just over halfway through his one year mission. His record comes from a total of four space missions, including two Shuttle missions and two ISS stays. While Kelly continues his mission to determine the long term effects of space flight on humans, his fellow ISS astronaut Andreas Mogensen has been testing a new skin suit developed...
We tend to think of the Moon as a boring old rock. “We’ve been there, so we know all there is to know, onto the next one.” But the Moon still holds secrets, and has its surprises. The formation of the Moon through collision of proto-Earth with a Mars-sized object is an idea that can give us a lot of insight into how the Earth formed and what raw materials we started with. But of course to study it we have to see what the Moon is made of in addition to what the Earth’s rocks contain. In recent years,...
