I hate the term ‘supermoon’. In fact that is the only time I’m going to use that term during this entire post. The Moon does appear a tiny bit larger in the sky, but it’s not an uncommon thing. Here’s why this one was particularly good at driving headlines. The technical term for the full Moon we saw this past week is a ‘perigee syzygy,’ which I think sounds way cooler. Perigee is the term for the Moon’s closest point to the Earth in it’s orbit, and syzygy is the term for an alignment of bodies in space, in this...
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...
Why does the Sun seem red near the horizon? Why does the Moon do the same? We know the Moon isn’t actually changing colour, and the Sun isn’t either. So what is happening to the light? The first thing to note about the image above is that the size of the Moon doesn’t change, showing that the well-known ‘Moon Illusion,’ where the Moon appears larger near the horizon, is just that – an illusion. The second is of course the gradual change in hue as the Moon rises. The reason for the colour shift really has nothing to do with the Moon...
Light is beautiful. It illuminates a world of beauty for us to appreciate while giving us a tool to decipher the riddles of the universe. In astronomy, it’s always about more photons! Because more photons = more data = better results. But in an increasingly technological world, more photons can be a bad thing. Especially when the artificial photons overpower the natural. I was lucky to spend most of my youth living away from the bright lights of the city, but with the sprawling metropolis of Toronto to the South, I could always see the orange glow that blocked out...
The closest star to the Earth, aside from the Sun, is Proxima Centauri, a small red dwarf star that is part of the Alpha Centauri system, roughly 4 light years away. If you don’t know light years, the distance is a staggering 37,800,000,000,000 Km. Beyond that our stellar neighbourhood fills in as you move 20 light years in any direction, and by 100 light years, there are dozens of stars around us. This gives a stellar density of about 0.14 stars per cubic parsec (a parsec is about 3.26 light years), pretty normal in terms of the number of stars in a given...
If a supernova were to go off somewhere in our galaxy, the minimum safe distance for Earthbound life would be about 50 light years. Any closer than that, and we would experience an intense blast of high energy radiation and an eventual shower of radioactive particles. It would be like nuclear bombs were set off all around the Earth, causing little destruction but a lot of radioactive fallout. Supernovae are incredibly powerful to be able to cause such damage at 50 light years, but even at larger distances, we can see evidence of their effects here on Earth. A team of...
There was a report about a month ago that a Fast Radio Burst (FRB) produced a repeating signal. This is big news because we really don’t know what causes FRBs, and once they have ended it can be difficult to trace their source. But a repeating signal means we can pinpoint their origin and potentially figure out their root cause. It’s no wonder the astronomical community was excited…and skeptical. Most of the FRBs that have been discovered were in archival data – data from past surveys that were given a closer look. Only a few have been seen in real-time, so when...
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...
Space seems dark to our weak human eyes. Most of the night sky is the blackness between stars. But in this darkness lies an endless number of photons, travelling in all different directions. These photos form background radiation, in three wavelengths in particular. You’ve likely heard of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), it there is also a Cosmic Optical Background (COB) and a Cosmic Infrared Background (CIB). The COB is explained by the immense number of stars in the Universe. It’s a diffuse glow across the entire sky. The CMB is the leftover radiation from hot plasma that existed when the Universe...
Since the dawn of human history, we have looked up into the night sky and found patterns in the stars. Some of us saw animals, others saw gods and heroes, but we all agreed that they were greater than our simple existence. In this blog series, we will take a deeper look into the constellations that Astronomers use to map today’s night sky. We will look into the history of each of the 88 constellations and the stars and objects that form them, to discover more about our culture, and our connection with the universe. Our first constellation on the list is bright, large,...
