Let me ask you, when you look at the stars on a cold, clear night, what do you see? Diamonds sparkling? Shapes? I do see those things, but I also see so much more. When I look at the stars, I see a thousand generations of humans looking up in wonder, writing shapes in the dirt and telling incredible stories of brave heroes, ferocious beasts, and important lessons. I see our common ancestors using the sky to predict the weather, the seasons, and even the coming of the end of the world. They were looking at a comet in the...
The month of October has some promising sights for Astronomers and the public, though only if you are an early riser. The intricate pre-dawn dance of the Planets Venus, Mars, and Jupiter continues from it’s initial soiree in September, with a couple of close passes throughout the month that are must-see. Early on in the month, the waning crescent moon passes the group and gives us a perspective on the plane of the Solar System. By month’s end, the planets will continue to shift around as they are joined by Mercury, slowly rising above the morning Sun. Here are a...
A video released a couple of days ago is a brilliant short film about a group of friends who went in to the Nevada desert and built a scale model of the solar system to give us a perspective on how large space actually is. Filmmakers Alex Gorosh and Wylie Overstreet led the project, which featured footage of the production of the model as well as some interesting results. Watch right to the end, where some fabulous footage of the Apollo program is shown, along with some inspiring words from the few men who have seen the Earth from beyond...
The true story of why Pluto isn’t a planet goes back further than you would think. It has a lot to do with our understanding of science at the time, and a lot more to do with surprising luck. I made this video a couple of days ago for the Khan Academy Talent Search. I hope you enjoy it. It will be interesting as we move into better telescope technologies that allow us to see further into the depths of the solar system and the universe. What strange mysteries will we find?
Okay so even though it is technically the first ever Earth-borne object to ever touch the surface of Mercury, it isn’t as hopeful as one might expect from the planet’s best and brightest scientists. But in all fairness we have crash landed on Mars, the Moon, and into the clouds of Jupiter, so it’s not uncommon. The Messenger spacecraft has been in space since 2004, orbiting the Sun multiple times in order to arrive at Mercury in 2008. Since then it has completed 4,103 orbits and obtained an incredible amount of scientific data as the first ever space probe to...
The first exoplanet ever discovered was 51 Pegasi b in 1995. It kicked marked the slow beginning of what would soon become the ‘exoplanet gold rush.’ It meant that for the first time, we had the technological capacity to discover new worlds, and science fiction soon became science fact. 51 Pegasi b was also a very strange planet. A massive Jupiter sized world orbiting very close to its home star. On one hand it was this characteristic that made it much easier to detect. On the other, it showed us that we did not understand planetary system formation as well...
About a year ago I had an idea for a music video. I wanted to take a concept in science and put it to music, making it funny, catchy, memorable, and educational. I wrote out the majority of the lyrics but left it alone for a few months, until I connected with the right friend. My good friend Bob Wegner is a very talented guitarist and audio engineer, and as we spoke about the idea he wanted to be the guy to record it. We spent an afternoon doing the vocals and guitars, and he cleaned it up and made...
Mercury, the smallest planet in the solar system, and closest to the Sun, is only a little bit bigger than Earth’s Moon. But the Moon is comparatively reflective object. Mercury is thought to be made of the same rock as the Moon, so what is the difference? Why do objects in our Solar system have different brightnesses? The key is in a property called albedo. It’s basically how much light an object reflects, measured as a fraction. For example, the Moon reflects 12% of the light the Sun shines on it, so it has an albedo of 0.12. The albedo...
After reaching a deeper understanding of the subsurface ocean of Enceladus just yesterday, a stunning discovery has just been made about the largest Moon in the solar system. The largest moon of Jupiter, Ganymede, contains a subsurface ocean of it’s own. The discovery was made with the Hubble space telescope and a careful study of aurora on the giant moon. That’s right Ganymede has auroral activity. This is because it is the only moon in the solar system with a magnetic field. The magnetic field funnels radiation from the Sun toward the north and south poles, where it ionizes molecules...
With the MESSENGER probe set to crash into Mercury this month, it’s nice to look back on some of the finest data that it gathered during its tenure orbiting the smallest planet of the solar system. The image shows the Caloris Basin, the largest impact basin on Mercury and one of the largest in the solar system. The result of a massive asteroid impact during the early days of the solar system, the 1,500 Km wide crater was filled with lava aeons ago when Mercury was geologically active (seen in orange). Large impacts have punctured the surface of the basin since...
