Last week, while looking at some of the best images from the Cassini spacecraft, I commented on the fact that the smooth rings of Saturn are small, varied chunks of ice and rock when you get down to the smaller scales. Reflecting on that this morning, I was thinking about how observing objects in our universe at smaller scales gives new insight into the variety and complexity of natural phenomena. Not long after, I came across a story of a new interesting object in our own Solar System. A new binary asteroid was discovered. This in itself isn’t too different...
Like lighthouse beacons in a dark ocean, stars act as tiny islands in the vast universe. Producing light at the atomic level from the powerful release of energy through fusion, they are the engines that drive the formation of new elements. But in the darkness there are plenty of other hidden objects that are cold and give off little to no light. Yet many of them are easily seen. Here’s Why! The first thing to think about is infrared light, the radiation given off by warm objects. Large planets and brown dwarf stars are very bright in infrared, much brighter...
One of my first books on Astronomy was about the planets. It had a collection of pictures from the first missions to each of the worlds in our solar system. Seeing those photos, the planets felt so alien, so different, and the perspective was like something out a 1950s science fiction comic. But now, with modern advancements in imaging technology and rocketry, we can send heavier instruments to distant worlds, and see them in high definition. It changes the perspective and makes the world seem more familiar than alien, more livable and real. Take a look at the first picture...
It’s mapping orbit #4 for the Dawn spacecraft as it orbits the dwarf planet Ceres. Currently mapping at an altitude of only 385 Km, the images are stunning, and give a feeling of actually being on Ceres. I can imagine the terrain, being in a crater, seeing the dark horizon off in the distance, the rocky-ice world untouched for Billions of years. It really reminds me of the Moon, with the powdery bright dust across the surface and craters dotting the landscape, yet when I see some of the close up craters, it feels very different from our familiar moon. ...
Twenty years of hunting exoplanets has given us nearly 2000 chunks of non-fusing rock and gas. It’s also given us the statistics to show that the galaxy is likely to be filled to the brim with other worlds, giving incredible potential for finding other Earths and maybe even other life. The latest discoveries involve the use of better technology, more intuitive methods, and more comprehensive searches. This means that we aren’t just discovering planets that are further from Earth, we are finding the ones that are nearby, but small enough to have been hidden, until now. The red dwarf star...
What do other planetary systems look like? We have seen some where massive Jupiter-sized worlds orbit closer to their star than Mercury does to the Sun, baking them with radiation. Others have had multiple rocky planets within the Earth’s orbit distance. Some have planets similar to Earth in a variety of locations. But what about far away from the star? We never expected to find gas giants like Uranus and Neptune in the far reaches of our solar system. Are there planetary systems where planets live even farther away? Maybe there are planets that live in the empty darkness between stars,...
When the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope comes a few years from now, we will have then opportunity to probe deeper into the cosmos than ever before, to see things we had only dreamed of seeing previously. Among the prime targets for this modern marvel of human ingenuity are potentially habitable exoplanets, where future humans could live, provided there isn’t already life occupying the real estate. To help astronomers assign importance to the growing number of exoplanets, researchers at the University of Washington’s Virtual Planetary Laboratory have devised an index to represent the habitability of worlds, near and...
As we are approaching the New Horizons bypass of Pluto just over a month from now, there is a lot of focus on the Plutonian system, from its strange Moons to its enigmatic surface. As we wait for the first ever high resolution images of the surface of Pluto, we can look to Hubble data to give us our fix. The best image of Pluto taken up to today, by Hubble, is blurry and at best can lead us to speculation about what we are seeing. But Hubble, as always, produces valuable science, and has given new insights into the...
There has been a lot of planetary news lately, in our own solar system and beyond. With the DAWN spacecraft approaching Ceres, New Horizons finally reaching Pluto in a few months, and the Kepler Space Telescope giving results from it’s new observing run. Not to mention comet Lovejoy, Mars Rover anniversary, and the Venus Metal Frost story. Normally I would pass on so much planetary news, even though it is one of my favourite areas of Astronomy. This story, however, is just too good to pass up. Kepler 444, a very ancient star 117 light years from Earth, about 25% smaller than...
