A bright fireball appeared in the sky over Hawaii a couple of days ago. It appeared to break into several pieces and burn up in the atmosphere. Naturally one would expect it to be a meteor, but if you take a look at the video below, it sticks around a little bit too long for that. Aside from the over-the-top reaction of those watching, it’s not as exciting and quick as a meteor. In fact, most meteors can move through the sky at up to 70 km/s, enough to burn up quickly and leave a bright flash in their wake....
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...
The thing about black holes is that they are very dense. If we took the entire 2,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Kg of the Sun (This is the real mass of the Sun) and turned it into a black hole, it would be about 6 Km in diameter. It is theorized that there are around 100 Million Black holes in the Milky Way Galaxy alone. But if they aren’t near a large reservoir of gas and dust, with their small size they are pretty harmless and invisible. The only way we could find them would be through their gravitational influence, which is hard to...
As the Kepler Space Telescope continues work on its second mission, the slow trickle of new exoplanet discoveries has begun. In the past few weeks scientists working with Kepler data have been able to identify new planets, and of course the variation continues to surprise us all. Most Recently, Kepler discovered a system of three planets orbiting the nearby red dwarf star EPIC 201367065, which is about half the size and mass of the Sun. The planets are all super-Earths, being only 2.1, 1.7, and 1.5 times the size of Earth and receiving 10.5, 3.2 and 1.4 times the light intensity of Earth...
Yesterday I wrote about young stars that had a habitable zone further away than we thought, and how this would help us spot habitable planets more easily in the future. Today is the second news story this week dealing with finding planets, and it deals with more familiar Sun-like stars and their dusty planetary discs. Dust is both a good thing and a bad thing when looking for planets orbiting other stars. Dust tells us that there is a high likelihood of finding planets, but too much dust blocks out the planets that we look for. Warm dust is worse...
As the Canadian Winter approaches and our country goes into collective hibernation, we start to remind the world how cold it gets here, and that the tourist season is in July. Still, we Canadians are proud of our hardiness and we will welcome you with open arms if you decide to visit in January. Still, if you look at a population map of Canada, we mostly live in the southern 10% of our country’s latitudes. There are thousands of square kilometres of open wilderness to explore. We want to be warm, but we also love our home country. Many Canadians...
The seventh planet from the Sun is a boring one. The best photos we have of Uranus were obtained in January 1986 during the passing of Voyager 2, and they revealed a cold, pale-green, ball of Methane four times the diameter of Earth with very little visible activity. Since then, we’ve learned a lot about Uranus, and it’s far more interesting than we thought. It has rings, a magnetosphere, and numerous moons. It has a 98 degree axial tilt, meaning that the poles of the planet cycle through 42 years of sunlight and 42 years of darkness during it’s 84...
