One of the most important questions our species has tackled is the origin of life on Earth. If we can figure out the conditions and catalyst for the beginning of life, we can look elsewhere in the universe for those same conditions, and zero in on the potential for finding extraterrestrial life. We know the universe is old enough for the painstakingly slow evolutionary process, but what started it? In the famous 1952 Miller-Urey experiment, a flask containing the basic natural elements water (H20), methane (CH4), Ammonia (NH4), and Hydrogen (H2), all present on the early Earth, was subjected to...
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...
The elements that make up our world and our selves, where do they come from? Sure there is plenty of Oxygen in the air, Silicon and Carbon are just lying around, and a bunch of other stuff can be found across our planet. but where did they come from originally? We know that most of the elements are synthesized within stars, but which ones aren’t? Which ones are made in a lab? The Big Bang gave rise to the first elements Hydrogen and Helium, which eventually clumped together to form the first stars and star producing the heavier stuff. Lithium,...
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...
I’ve been saving this one for a few months, specifically for my Halloween post! This was such an interesting story, it was hard for me to pass it up before. There are ghosts in these distant galaxies! Look at the images above, and see the ghostly green figures. They are ionized Oxygen, helium, nitrogen, sulphur, and neon that has absorbed high energy radiation and slowly re-emitted it over thousands of years. The photoionized gas clouds in the images are tens of thousands of light years outside their host galaxies, so where did this high energy radiation come from? The answer, is...
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...
How often does a star explode as a supernova in the Milky Way? With as many as 400 Billion stars, you would expect it to happen often But stars live a very long time, and most massive stars take anywhere from a few hundred million to a few billion years to reach maturity and explode. Putting all this together gives us a surprisingly human estimate. A supernova explodes in the Milky Way, on average, once every 50 years, or about once per human lifetime. We can still see remnants of great explosions that happened long ago, still expanding into the...
Think about Earth and its population of over 7 Billion people. That’s 7 Billion people who wake up, breathe, live, think, experience, and interact with each other. The sheer volume of interactions and variation in the human experience is staggering. Every second you are alive these interactions are happening all around you, and far from you in any corner of the planet. Millions of people right now feel sad, happy, ecstatic, broken, angry, tired, energetic, and everything in between. Now if we go beyond to the Milky Way, where there are more than 50 stars for each and every homo sapiens on...
If there’s one difference I notice between Science and Religion, it’s that when questions come up and something unexpected flies in the face of a well-established principle, Science gets excited, Religion gets defensive. I’m always on the lookout for new data that causes us to rethink the ideas we have, and when I find something, I get excited because it means we’ve found something that has been elusive for a long time. Isaac Asimov said it best: The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny…’ – Isaac Asimov...
Have you ever heard of an object called ‘Hanny’s Voorwerp?’ It’s a thin wispy ghost-like blob at the edge of a Galaxy. It was discovered by Dutch schoolteacher Hanny van Arkel in 2007 as she was classifying galaxies as part of the Galaxy Zoo project. Since then, astronomers have been studying its origin, as it was the first of a brand new phenomenon in astronomy. This past week, a new data set of wispy trails at the edge of Galaxies have been released as part of a Hubble study by Bill Keel of the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. The new Hubble...
