It hasn’t been found yet – let me make that clear. But with evidence that it should exist, astronomers are looking more closely at the proposed planet nine and how it might have formed, and how it could have ended up in such a distant orbit. When you start to think about how a planet ten times the mass of Earth could have ended up more than ten times as far from the Sun as Neptune, a few scenarios pop into mind: It was formed in the inner solar system, where interactions with gas giants or another star pulled it out It formed...
Black holes form when a massive star runs out of fuel. Gravity causes the core to collapse down to an object so dense that light itself can not escape. In the Milky Way galaxy, there are expected to be over 100 Million black holes, though of course we can’t see them. The one we can see is the supermassive black hole Sag A*, lying deep within the core of the galaxy. But how did Sag A* form? Was it from the merger of many smaller black holes? Or is there some other process forming the most enigmatic objects in the...
Gold doesn’t come from your local jewelry store, and the Gold rush that occurred in the Yukon territory at the turn of the 20th century is not the source I’m talking about either. I want to take it further back, to the origins of gold the element. Similar to the origins of most other elements on the periodic table, it requires an immense amount of energy, such as the nuclear fusion that goes on within a star. But Gold can not be made by a star’s thermonuclear engine. Gold requires more energy, as does every other element heavier than Iron. So...
Baryonic matter, which is everything we are made of and everything we can see in the universe, is not a lot of stuff. I mean to a tiny Earthling, it’s a heck of a lot, but if you put it all together it only makes up about 5% of the total Mass-Energy in the Universe. If you’ve ever seen the Millennium simulation, it highlights the fact that both baryonic and dark matter are organized into filaments of mass, with the baryonic matter at the densest points, ie the galaxies. What lies between these dense nodes and filaments are vast empty...
The merger of black holes proven by LIGO yesterday looks amazing in this simulated view in today’s APOD. What would normally take a third of a second has been stretched out to show the entanglement. And remember, these things are far more massive than the Sun, so to be moving this quickly and merging is an extremely high-energy interaction. And kablammo, matter converted to energy, gravitational waves aplenty, and an even bigger black hole. Happy Long Weekend!
Sadly no, this time we are NOT talking about Pluto. Astronomer Mike Brown from Caltech, heralded as the ‘man who killed planet Pluto’ has done some new work that might replace Pluto with a better fit for a true ninth planet, one that is ten times the mass of Earth. Now the only problem is finding it. But wait, if we haven’t seen it, how do we know it’s there? Well it certainly showcases the power of science, that an understanding of the true laws of nature can give us incredible predictive power. It started out as a ‘that’s strange’...
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...
The moons of Mars, aptly named for the sons of the god of war, Phobos (Fear) and Deimos (Panic) are more like asteroids than the larger moons we generally associate with planets. The moons are only 22 Km (phobos) and 12 Km (deimos) in diameter, and orbit their planet is 7 hours and 30 hours respectively. The larger moon Phobos is moving toward its planet by almost 7 feet every year, due to the massive gravitational forces it feels from Mars. As it moves closer than its current distance of 6,000 Km, tidal forces from Mars will slowly increase,...
For years there has been talk of a subsurface ocean present within Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus. Many have simply assumed it to be fact, but the reality is, something so complex on a world so far away is very difficult to prove conclusively. But now, using data from over a decade of observations by the Cassini spacecraft, mission scientists have shown conclusively that Enceladus must have a global ocean beneath a surface of ice. Previous data analysis suggested that there was a lens-shaped liquid ocean beneath the south polar region of the planet, giving a source for the observed plumes...
Friday’s science update from the New Horizons team shed some more light on the seemingly endless jaw-dropping discoveries from the Pluto system. We have found a surprising atmosphere and very cold ice flows, contributing to a surprisingly active geology for an object that receives so little sunlight. Seven hours after the craft made its closest approach of Pluto, it turned around and took a backlit shot, revealing two distinct layers of hazy atmosphere at 80 Km and 50 Km above the surface respectively. It looks more like an eclipse photograph from much closer to home, but it shows a hauntingly...
