A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…. Not just the star wars intro, but a true statement if you’re an astronomer. You see, once we start to look deep in space at the more distant objects in the universe, we are actually looking deep in time as well. It all begins with a light year. A light year is not a measure of time, it’s a measure of distance. When you turn on the light in a dark room, the light appears to fill the room instantly. But it actually takes a small amount of time, as light has...
Every year, as the Earth revolves around the Sun, we pass an imaginary line directly from the Sun to Saturn. The Sun is on one side of us and Saturn is on the other. When two bodies are on opposite sides of the Earth like this we call it opposition. Saturn’s opposition for the year was on May 23rd, and even though it has been a few days, you can still see Saturn up pretty much all night. Along with opposition, we can clearly see the rings, but Saturn does wobble on a 29.5 year cycle, meaning there are times...
Ever heard the term ‘champagne flow?’ I’m not talking about a celebration, it’s actually a term in astronomy. When a cluster of massive stars form and ionize the surrounding hydrogen cloud, the hot gas propels itself through the layers of cooler gas at the cluster outskirts. When the hot gas finally bursts through to the vacuum of space, it flows rapidly like a newly opened bottle of champagne. This is exactly what’s happening in the cluster RCW 34, a young, gaseous cluster in the southern constellation Vela. The interesting thing about this cluster is that its nearly invisible in optical...
Auroras on Earth are caused by the ionization of atoms high in the atmosphere near the north and south magnetic poles. The solar wind flies toward the Earth and this harmful radiation is blocked and funnelled by our magnetic field, creating harmless, beautiful glows that remind us how close we came to total destruction, but were saved by our planet. Do other planets have auroras? Certainly! Jupiter and Saturn do, and even moons like Ganymede can have auroral activity. It really depends on the magnetic field. So how does a planet like Mars, with no magnetic field, have auroras? This...
Of the approximately 100 Million galaxies in the visible universe, we see incredible variation. We always try to classify them based on their shape, size, and peak radiation, but even then we still find others that stray from the usual patterns. In recent years, a new class of galaxies named Extremely Luminous Infrared Galaxies (ELIRGs) has been found with data from the Wide Field Infrared Survey (WISE). Now the king of the ELIRGs has been found, the most luminous galaxy in the universe. The galaxy, designated WISE J224607.57-052635.0, has a luminosity equal to 300 Trillion suns, and may owe its brightness...
When we have the best telescopes at our disposal, we can take the most detailed data, and ultimately gain the most valuable science. Being able to take a closer look, to resolve the finer details, to see what lies within, gives us the ability to understand the present, peer into the past, and ultimately, predict the future. The ESO’s Very Large Telescope continuously brings in fantastic images of objects that we have studied previously, but weren’t quite sure about. This week we saw another prime example of this. The Medusa Nebula is a planetary nebula in the constellation Gemini. It...
For a long time, the scientific community has been hopeful for a mission to some of the most interesting moons of the solar system. Europa, Enceladus, and Ganymede all have subsurface oceans and will give substantial insights into the formation and evolution of life in the solar system and beyond. The only problem is that it costs an astronomical (literally) amount of money to get there. A bare bones mission to Europa would cost over 600 Million dollars, and if we are spending that much we had better be sure it will work. Money aside, the technology to get appropriate...
It sounds completely like science fiction, something out of a campy space thriller where the protagonist is a miner taking a daily shuttle to the Moon to mine all the precious metals that the Earth needs to sustain itself. But in real life, for a long time, it was thought that the Moon was a dead rock, completely useless to humanity except as the gravitational force to provide the amazing tides in the bay of Fundy. Today we know so much more about the Moon, and its value has (pun intended) skyrocketed. For one, the low gravity of the Moon...
Eight minutes after launching from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, a Russian Proton-M rocket experienced a catastrophic failure in its third stage rocket, resulting in the complete atmospheric burn-up of the rocket and its payload, a Mexican Communications Satellite. After launching at 11:47am local time in Kazakhstan, the rocket experienced an emergency situation 497 seconds into the flight, reported as a failure in the rocket’s Breeze-M third stage. The carrier rocket was launching the Mexsat 1 communications satellite, known as Centenario, into orbit, in a contract with the Mexican government. After reaching a 161 Km altitude, the rocket failed and fell back to...
It sounds like something out of a science fiction novel. The incredible and rare dark star cluster, hiding the evil super villain’s headquarters. A dark star cluster is something I would imagine as a spooky, eerie type of place where everything you see changes when you enter its space. Science fiction aside, a dark star cluster is real, and it’s a new type of cluster that is similar to the mighty dense globular clusters that orbit most galaxies. Globular clusters orbit in a halo of space around the centres of galaxies, and though our Milky Way harbours 150 of them,...
