It’s been a good couple of years for lunar eclipses, we are in the midst of what we call a tetrad, which is a series of four lunar eclipses spread out evenly over a period of time, usually 2 years, in this case April and October. For observers watching the April 4th morning eclipse, in my boat here in Toronto, you won’t be able to see it because the Moon will set and the Sun will rise just as it gets good. Plus you would have to wake up at 5:30am to go look at it. Pretty much everyone East...
The deeper we peer through the cosmos, the more we are looking into the distant past. Light from other galaxies takes millions of years to reach us, and so when that light has finally arrived at Earth, it is millions of years old, a snapshot in time of the distant galaxy. The furthest we can see is so far back in the history of the universe, that galaxies haven’t even formed yet. As we look at the large-scale structure of the Universe, we see it filled with a cosmic web of galaxy clusters, containing tens of thousands of galaxies each....
When Canadian Astronaut Chris Hadfield was in space, on the International Space Station (ISS), he stayed there for six months, the standard length of stay for an astronaut. On the ISS, three of the six-person crew are replaced every three months. After returning to Earth, Hadfield could barely walk. He had lost bone density and muscle mass, his immune system weakened, cardiovascular functions slowed, and he produced less red blood cells. The lack of gravity is bad for humans, The longest a human being has ever been in space was Russian cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov, who was in space for a staggering...
Every 29.5 days we see a new Moon, or rather we don’t see it, since it’s lost in the glare of the Sun. But a few days after the new moon, we can see it slowly move away from the Sun and become visible after sunset, with the thinnest crescent growing a bit larger each night. You may have heard that Mars and Venus also live in the Western sky after sunset, with Venus moving higher and Mars appearing to double back toward the Sun, soon to be lost in the glare of our home star. Last night I was...
The biggest problem in theoretical physics today is the marriage between Quantum Mechanics and Gravity. Throw in the fact that whatever theory comes out of it has to additionally be able to explain Dark Matter and Dark Energy, and we have ourselves a massive problem to solve. How do we reconcile the seemingly random probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics with the smooth, pliable space-time of General Relativity. We have two incredible theories that explain the Universe, make predictions accurately, and have led to amazing advances in technology and understanding, yet they completely disagree with each other at common scales. So...
Aurora Borealis (Northern Lights) and Aurora Australis (Southern Lights) are the most beautiful result of the Earth protecting us from a horrible death by solar radiation. Every time I see it, I marvel in the beauty and remind myself that I am still safe from being cooked by that giant ball of gas that is responsible for fundamentally fuelling all life on Earth. So when we have a lot of auroral activity, I pop over to spaceweather to see if it will be visible from where I live. Though it usually isn’t, today’s aurora are potentially visible, so I might...
Over the course of a day the Earth changes quite a lot. Lightning strikes the Earth 8 Million times per day as the mighty water cycle on our planet churns under the power of the Sun’s warmth and the Coriolis force on the Earth. But have we ever just stared at the Earth’s surface over the course of the day? Definitely. We have seen the day to day changes from many different altitudes above the Earth’s surface, and the above image shows stunning changes over the course of a day. But how do we get a picture like this?...
Even I was blown away when I saw this image a friend sent me. Gravitational lensing is a rare occurrence, and a supernova is a rare occurrence, so to see a supernova in a gravitationally lensed galaxy deep within the universe is exceptional. So exceptional that it was spotted for the first time ever in a Hubble image of the distant universe. That dot in the image is a single supernova in a very distant galaxy, split into four images by the gravitational lensing of the galaxy cluster in front of it. But there is also a secondary lensing effect from...
With all the amazing Science coming from Mars in the last decade, its seems easy to conclude that humans have a good understanding of our rusty neighbour. And then something new and unexpected happens. To someone who thought we knew all there was to know, this may be a disappointment. But to a scientist who has a passion for discovery, new and unexpected results are where the biggest breakthroughs happen! Massive plumes have been spotted high in the atmosphere of Mars, at an altitude of over 250 Km, where the thin Martian atmosphere is nearly indistinguishable from the emptiness of...
It’s been cold lately. The temperature has fallen somewhere between Hoth and Pluto, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to change any time soon. It seems we complain about the weather no matter the season. It’s too hot, too cold, too wet, too dry, too bright, too dark. We do have a lot of variation in the seasons, but compared to some other planets, Earth is pretty mild in its climate. One such case is the recently discovered Kepler 432b. A massive planet six times heavier than Jupiter with a comparable size, it orbits closer to its parent star than Mercury...
