This story popped up yesterday, and I can imagine it will go far, since it talks about life in the universe. I get it, it’s what people are interested in, and at least this story is focused on the science of why this is the best place to look for intelligent civilizations, instead of “Oh hey there’s a strange ring of material around a star, must be an alien superstructure.” But I digress. So where is the best place to look for life in the universe? The answer is in a Globular Cluster. A globular cluster is one of the...
If you actually had the ability to see X-Rays, the world around you would look pretty boring. Actually it would be invisible, since nothing around you gives off X-rays. You might be able to see an imaging device if you live or work near a medical office, but that’s about it. If you looked at the night sky, you would see many interesting sources of X-Ray light, mostly from active black holes in our own galaxy and beyond. Recently a high-resolution scan of the Andromeda Galaxy revealed a plethora of sources, showing where black holes and neutron stars are feeding...
Have you ever seen those amazing composite images that people will post, showing the same picture every day or every year for a long period of time. We see how children age, how people transform their bodies, and how their day to day experiences, though seemingly small, add up to incredible changes as the years go by. I personally love time-lapse photography, representing a long period of time in a shorter instance. For me the beauty is showing those changes that are subtle in human experience and communicating them in a way that shows how significant they are when we...
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...
Dark matter is everywhere. There is way more of it in the universe than the matter we are made of and interact with. Yet for the sheer amount of it, we have no way of determining what exactly it is. It’s as if we didn’t know what air was, and even though we could see it and breathe it, we couldn’t measure it. The most tantalizing part about dark matter is that we can see the gravitational effect it has, and so we can determine how much of it there has to be. Some places in the universe have more dark matter than...
A couple of weeks ago, using the Subaru Telescope, astronomers from the Carnegie Institution for Science discovered the newest dwarf planet of our solar system, which may end up claiming the title for most distant dwarf planet. The object, which isn’t even confirmed as a dwarf planet yet, is called V774104. It resides a distance of 2-3 times that of Pluto, around 9 Billion Km. It is expected to be a little less than half of Pluto’s size, and it may have a highly eccentric orbit, bringing it closer to the Sun over it’s multi-century trip around the solar system. “That’s...
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...
The Milky Way is a decently big Galaxy. At 100,000 light years across, it is a full size barred spiral galaxy and distinctly different from what we would call ‘dwarf galaxies.’ But there are much larger galaxies in the universe. Most reside near the centre of a massive galaxy cluster and are the result of Billions of years of mergers and collisions. But some appear large because of their incredibly powerful release of energy. A new Galaxy discovered in the early universe by a team of astronomers from the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics is an incredible 4 million light years...
Out of the over 2000 confirmed exoplanets, not one has been seen in the conventional sense, where we would see it’s surface, map out features and colours, and understand it’s atmosphere or surface from what we saw. Instead all the knowledge we have of exoplanets is based on the light we see. How big is the dip in the Kepler Telescope’s light curve? What absorption features do the reflected light of this planet show? This information is the result of careful analysis and brilliant inference, since the planets themselves are immeasurably tiny and hard to spot next to their giant...
The Sun. A bright fiery light in the sky to some, worshipped as a god by others, seen as a massive ball of hydrogen plasma 150 million kilometres away by scientists. Once in a while, the Sun goes ahead and releases massive amounts of charged plasma particles toward the Earth. The particles should eradicate humanity with horrible burns and render our planet lifeless, but luckily… they don’t. Why? The Earth’s magnetic field protects us, funnelling the particles to the poles where they ionize gases in the atmosphere and become harmless. The bonus for humanity, aside from not dying, is that we...
