When Isaac Newton quantified gravity, his theory explained how everything in the world around us behaved in its presence. It opened a door to an understanding of something fundamental, yet elusive in explanation. Centuries later, Einstein came along and took a step back, finding a larger more comprehensive theory of gravity, one that explained the strange things that happen in the grand universe. His theory could even explain things that Newton’s theory of gravity could not, such as the odd orbit of Mercury around the Sun. But the greatest part of Einstein’s theory is that if you use it to...
We are reaching the point in our study of exoplanets, planets orbiting other stars, where the atmospheres of distant worlds are within the limits of our technology. Once we could barely see the wobble of a star, the telltale sign of an exoplanet, and now we can see reflected starlight and study a distant atmosphere. Now we can probe deeper questions, are atmospheres of exoplanets similar to solar system planets? What are they made of? Do other solar systems have the same raw materials as ours? Do they have what we believe to be the raw materials for life? A...
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 only way we can understand the cosmos is to find new and innovative ways to interpret the light we capture from it. Using the largest and most technologically advanced telescopes in the world, we peer deeper into space, further back in time, and see photons that have spent eons travelling to Earth. If we can get rid of all of the other light from closer objects, and zero in on this distant light, we can begin to understand what was present at the beginning. Using data from deep sky surveys conducted by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), astronomers from...
The mysteries of the Occator crater on Ceres have continued to puzzle astronomers and the public, even as we have seen increasing resolution in recent photos. The latest photos show a resolution of 140 meters per pixel and reveal striking details, though the jury is still out on what exactly the bright material is and where it came from. It seems incredibly likely that the bright spots are ices of some sort, maybe even water ice, since Ceres is a water-rich body, and may have more water than Earth! One hypothesis is that Ceres has a subsurface layer of water,...
Categorizing objects in the universe can be difficult. The fiasco with Pluto over the last decade is more than proof of that. We generally look to location and then to size as the two main methods for classifying the stuff that permeates the cosmos. Galaxies contain stars, which host orbiting planets, which host orbiting moons; While asteroids fly in between planets and icy comets are wander through the outskirts of star systems. But what about the in-between objects? Often we find strange things in strange places. There are moons in our solar system that are larger than planets. What would...
Looking at the universe in different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum can reveal features and structures that are invisible to human eyes. The vast black emptiness of space explodes into a sea of colour when we use cameras to expand our vision. Looking at a galaxy through human eyes can be a simple and seemingly uninteresting view, but in infrared, microwave, or ultraviolet wavelengths we see the deeper layers of the vast array of stars. The closest large spiral galaxy and a cousin of our own Milky Way, the Andromeda galaxy, is revealed in ultraviolet. The Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX)...
Ever heard the term ‘champagne flow?’ I’m not talking about a celebration, it’s actually a term in astronomy. When a cluster of massive stars form and ionize the surrounding hydrogen cloud, the hot gas propels itself through the layers of cooler gas at the cluster outskirts. When the hot gas finally bursts through to the vacuum of space, it flows rapidly like a newly opened bottle of champagne. This is exactly what’s happening in the cluster RCW 34, a young, gaseous cluster in the southern constellation Vela. The interesting thing about this cluster is that its nearly invisible in optical...
One of the largest and brightest star clusters in the Milky Way galaxy is the Arches cluster, and its easy to see why. Lying only 100 light years away from the supermassive black hole that lies in the heart of our galaxy, it formed in an incredibly dense environment. It lies 25,000 light years from Earth in the constellation Sagittarius, and contains thousands of massive stars, including 160 that are hot, young, and exceptionally more massive than the Sun. Only 1 in 10 Million stars in the galaxy are as bright as these massive central 160 stars. Though it is...
Of the approximately 100 Million galaxies in the visible universe, we see incredible variation. We always try to classify them based on their shape, size, and peak radiation, but even then we still find others that stray from the usual patterns. In recent years, a new class of galaxies named Extremely Luminous Infrared Galaxies (ELIRGs) has been found with data from the Wide Field Infrared Survey (WISE). Now the king of the ELIRGs has been found, the most luminous galaxy in the universe. The galaxy, designated WISE J224607.57-052635.0, has a luminosity equal to 300 Trillion suns, and may owe its brightness...
