It’s coming up fast. The March 6th orbital injection of the Dawn spacecraft about the dwarf planet Ceres is set to be an incredible event. The latest photos show a much more detailed Ceres that we have seen previously. The newest images reveal that Ceres is a rocky, cratered world, not unlike the Moon or Mercury. Still, we have yet to determine the origins of the bright spots on the surface. Just over two weeks from now the world will see an unmasked Ceres.
It’s been cold lately. The temperature has fallen somewhere between Hoth and Pluto, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to change any time soon. It seems we complain about the weather no matter the season. It’s too hot, too cold, too wet, too dry, too bright, too dark. We do have a lot of variation in the seasons, but compared to some other planets, Earth is pretty mild in its climate. One such case is the recently discovered Kepler 432b. A massive planet six times heavier than Jupiter with a comparable size, it orbits closer to its parent star than Mercury...
For Christmas I was given a green 200 mW laser! A couple of AAA batteries later and the laser can point out any star or object in the night sky, with the beam clearly visible the entire way up to infinity. Its the epitome of an Astronomer’s toolkit, at least in my eyes, and it got me thinking about all the amazing things you can see in the sky right now. It also makes me feel like I’m brandishing a light saber, and sadly it’s about as close as I’ll ever get. First off, Venus is back in the evening...
Twenty Years of exoplanet research has seen incredible advances in detecting planets orbiting distant stars, as well as their size, orbit period, orbit distance, and even atmospheric composition. But the next step in understanding exoplanets is to learn about their magnetic fields. We know that many exoplanets should have magnetic fields. It makes sense, since nearly every world in our own solar system has some sort of magnetism. But for the first time, an international team of Astronomers, led by Kristina Kislyakova of the Space Research Institute of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, have discovered a way to detect magnetic fields...
