This post is a collaboration with my good friend Bob Wegner, a professional musician, amateur astronomer, and genuinely good person. With the New Horizons spacecraft passing Ultima Thule on New Year’s eve 2019, Bob and I noticed that Queen guitarist and astronomer Brian May was on hand for the live event, playing a newly-written song to mark the event. Bob and I often talk about astronomy, as I’m always interested in his perspective as an enthusiast, while he’s equally interested in my opinion as a professional. We decided to take this event and write about it from two perspectives. For...
It’s been nine months since NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft flew past Pluto. Time sure does fly. And even though the spacecraft is moving further from Pluto and Earth, it’s still sending back the massive amounts of data it gathered during closest approach. As this data is received, the huge team of scientists that are part of the mission use it to characterize Pluto so humanity can begin to understand just how strange the distant dwarf Planet is. Five new papers characterize some of the latest science done on the enigmatic world. Here’s a quick summary of each: The first paper from...
One of the first things you hear when learning about the states of matter is about good old H2O: Steam, Water, Ice. Naturally you are asked “Why does Ice float?” The answer is a simple matter of density, frozen water is less dense because water expands when it freezes. You can do a bit of an experiment by filling a balloon with water. Paint the balloon and put it in the freezer. When it freezes the water will expand, and so will the rubbery balloon, but the dried paint will crack at weak points. This is exactly the same thing...
Cryovolcano is a cool word, literally and figuratively. You hear about it a lot when talking about solar system moons like Enceladus, and it’s one of those words that would make a heck of a great Hollywood disaster movie title, like ‘Sharknado’ or ‘Armageddon.’ I do not, however, endorse either of those movies, they were both terrible. At any rate, a real cryovolcano seems like an interesting thing. It’s a volcano in the sense that it looks a little like a mountain and spews out material when the pressure builds from beneath the surface, but it’s not your traditional Earth-like volcano...
After focussing all of its energy on taking science data during closest approach, New Horizons has been slowly but surely sending back the stream of information collected on the Pluto system. This long process of returning the data to Earth has meant periodic updates for humanity, and a rekindling of excitement for the newest secrets revealed about the dwarf planet. Here is a video of the region of Pluto imaged in high resolution, followed by some of the best still along the way. This is the closest and most detailed view of Pluto that humanity will have for decades. We...
As the results from Pluto and its system of moons continues to pour in, we are seeing a lot of scientists keeping busy in excitement as they interpret the data and work to understand the complexities of the recently illuminated dwarf planet. The fascinating images that have returned have also been interpreted and manipulated in ways that show fascinating features and unexpected views. A recent rendering shows a complete rotation of Pluto and Charon from images taken by New Horizons. Since it takes Pluto 6 days, 9 hours, and 36 minutes to rotate, New Horizons couldn’t take high resolution images...
Now that New Horizons has passed by Pluto and it’s moons, it’s time we updated out images of the entire system. Taking images from New Horizons, today’s APOD shows the relative sizes of the moons with the best photos we have of them to date. Looking at the image, it makes sense that Nix and Hydra weren’t discovered until 2005, and that Kerberos and Styx were not found until 2012. The moons are so tiny and distant, and are dwarfed by the larger Charon and central Pluto. As far as we know, this is it for Pluto’s moons, since we haven’t...
Every so often we see a new set of images from Pluto, giving us a chance to rediscover it multiple times. It’s like we are experiencing the July fly-by over and over again, and each new set of images reveals something new and exciting. I feel the same sense of excitement and discovery each time I see a new image, realizing that it spent 6 hours as a beam of light crossing the 5 Billion Kilometres of the solar system to connect us to the New Horizons probe, a lonely little piece of human ingenuity flying through the darkness. Here...
Some colour images were released from New Horizons today, showing some of the first true colour views of the icy dwarf planet. The amazing thing is that to human eyes, the combination of Methane and Nitrogen in the atmosphere give it a gorgeous blue tinge. The other amazing piece of news is that Pluto has water ice on its surface! Check out these photos highlighted for surface water ice. By looking for the signature of Sunlight reflected off water, the cameras on New Horizons can spot regions where water ice is dominant. Pluto continues to surprise!
The high resolution data keeps on coming in from New Horizons, now far beyond the dwarf planet Pluto. Using some of the images as the craft flew by, mission scientists were able to create a fantastic video that gives you some perspective as if you were flying along yourself. We can see Charon and other moons during the early and later stages of the fly-by, with the orbits overlaid, giving perspective on how the Plutonian system’s mechanics work. As the craft approaches Pluto, time slows down to appreciate the closest approach and see the stunning detail revealed in the...
