Astronomers save up some of their best science for conferences. When all of their friends and colleagues get together it can be a big opportunity to show off and impress the titans of the field. This is why big astronomy meetings generate a lot of science news. This is the third or fourth story I’ve posted about the proceedings at the Royal Astronomical Society’s National meeting this week, and the good science just keeps coming in. Although I had strong opinions about a declaration of potential life on Comet 67P earlier this week, a story from the same meeting, I...
Lurking in the depths of a galaxy, hidden from human eyes, lie millions of monsters. They could swallow you up in an instant, sealing you off from the outside world and devouring you atom by atom. This sounds like your typical Hollywood monster movie, but with millions of black holes hidden throughout the galaxy, its more real than you might think. Supermassive black holes, the largest ones that reside at the centers of galaxies, are much easier to see. They are devouring gas and dust rapidly, resulting in bright emission across the electromagnetic spectrum, especially in x-rays. For many galaxies,...
On July 4th, for about an hour and twenty minutes, my heart stopped. This was the amount of time that New Horizons was quiet. No contact, no data, nothing but the lonely black of space. In this time, the craft did what it was programmed to do. It transferred control to its backup computer, which told the main computer to enter safe mode and suspend all non-essential functions. Then the backup computer attempted to re-establish contact with Earth, 5 Billion Kilometres away. Contact has been re-established with the craft and its backup computer has been transmitting telemetry data back to mission...
If you could see through the lens of a very powerful telescope, to an area of sky the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length, a new universe would be revealed to you. For in that tiny patch of seemingly empty sky, there are thousands of galaxies visible, albeit with many hours of light collection. Observing the most distant of these galaxies, at the edge of the universe, allows us to estimate the number of Galaxies present in the distant past, when the universe was very young. As our observations improve, and our ability to simulate the conditions of the...
The Rosetta orbiter lies in a vast empty space, inhabited only by its orbital companion – a 4 Km wide ball of ice and dust, spitting out gases and other material as it is warmed by the Sun’s rays. It’s next mission milestone comes on August 13th, 2015, when the duo reaches perihelion, the closest point to the Sun in their orbit. It will be the first time a spacecraft has the opportunity to study the outgassing and behaviour of a comet as it orbits close to the Sun. So far the comet 67P/ Churyumov-Gerasimenko has been slowly increasing in...
The true story of why Pluto isn’t a planet goes back further than you would think. It has a lot to do with our understanding of science at the time, and a lot more to do with surprising luck. I made this video a couple of days ago for the Khan Academy Talent Search. I hope you enjoy it. It will be interesting as we move into better telescope technologies that allow us to see further into the depths of the solar system and the universe. What strange mysteries will we find?
Woman got the worse deal when author John Gray wrote a book titled ‘Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus.’ The point he was clearly making was about the communication issues between the sexes, but men definitely got the better deal in home worlds. For one, Mars is kind of cold, has polar ice caps, is covered in rust and dust, has been pretty dead inside for millions of years, and is bombarded with radiation from the Sun (you can draw your own parallels to men yourself). But Venus, with its 400 degree Celsius temperature, sulphuric acid rain, incredibly...
When Charles Messier catalogued 100 different objects in the night sky, he couldn’t have imagined the richness and detail of each one of his individual discoveries, or that we would ever see them in such incredible detail as to understand what they truly are and how they evolve. But every time I see a new image of a well-known object, I not only see the new and amazing details revealed, I see the next level of technology that enables us to see it in a new light. This image of Messier number 64 gives me that view. Messier 64 is...
Since it’s landing made international headlines back in November as it landed on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, the Philae lander has been in hibernation mode, not able to generate enough power to operate due to a lack of direct sunlight on its solar panels. But after 7 months, as the comet has come closer to the Sun, the increasing solar intensity has given it the boost it needed to wake up! “Philae is doing very well: It has an operating temperature of -35ºC and has 24 Watts available,” explains DLR Philae Project Manager Dr. Stephan Ulamec. “The lander is ready for operations.” The...
The vast majority of the articles you see in the world of science are written by a professional science writer about a postdoctoral fellow and a tenured professor who made a major discovery in a collaboration with another tenured professor from across an ocean working at a multi-million dollar supercomputer run by a wealthy world-renowned institution. And yet there is a huge amount of talk in the education world about how we have to find ways to teach and inspire our kids to participate in the process of discovery and integrate STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math). If we want to...
