If you guessed that I was referring to the Pleiades, you are correct. The small open star cluster, Messier 45, is about 440 Light Years from Earth, relatively close for a star cluster. We are able to see it with the naked eye in Autumn and Winter here in the Northern Hemisphere. The stars in the Pleiades are young and bright blue, meaning they are very massive and hot. By young, I mean somewhere around a hundred Million Years, about 40 times younger than the Sun. The smears of blue in the above photo show that the cluster is still...
Twenty Years of exoplanet research has seen incredible advances in detecting planets orbiting distant stars, as well as their size, orbit period, orbit distance, and even atmospheric composition. But the next step in understanding exoplanets is to learn about their magnetic fields. We know that many exoplanets should have magnetic fields. It makes sense, since nearly every world in our own solar system has some sort of magnetism. But for the first time, an international team of Astronomers, led by Kristina Kislyakova of the Space Research Institute of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, have discovered a way to detect magnetic fields...
I’ve talked about black holes previously, and only in our own Galaxy, and only the big one in the middle, Sag A*. When I speak with the public and with kids about Black Holes, most people never really understand that there aren’t just one or two kicking around, but potentially there are as many as a Billion Black Holes in our own Galaxy! The problem is, we are not very good at finding them. It makes sense, they give off no light, and we can only find them through indirectly measuring their effects on the surrounding environment. We can sometimes see...
Launched in December of 2013, the European Space Agency (ESA)’s GAIA Mission will be the next great mission to find exoplanets, planets orbiting stars other than our own Sun. However, GAIA’s main mission is not to search for planets, but to look at the motion, physical characteristics, and distance of up to one Billion stars with incredible precision. It’s a given that the satellite will invariably find planets by seeing the ‘wobble’ of a star due to the gravity of a planetary system. One of the strengths that GAIA posesses over other exoplanet studies is that it will search a...
NASA had announced a press conference for yesterday afternoon to reveal amazing findings that would ‘change how we look at galaxies.’ And they did just that, sort of. Findings from the Cosmic Infrared Background Experiment (CIBER) reveal that there is a huge surplus of Infrared light present in the vast darkness that exists between Galaxies. Infrared light is invisible to the human eye, but is emitted by most room temperature objects. It fills the EM spectrum at wavelengths longer than visible light (See yesterday’s post for the EM spectrum). This surplus of light is greater than what we would expect from galaxies...
The Hubble Space telescope produced the finest Astronomical images in a generation, but Hubble’s time in the limelight has ended, and now it’s time for a new generation of both space- and ground-based telescopes to take over with their own jaw-dropping images and revolutionary science. Recently the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) has taken the leap and used its full power to take an astonishing image of the protoplanetary disk of the young star HL Tau. This image is of a very young star, only about a million years old (Which is really young compared to the 4.5 billions year old...
If you’re in Astronomy circles you may have heard about a big cloud of Hydrogen heading toward the supermassive black hole in the centre of our galaxy, Sagittarius A*. The lead up to the cloud approaching the black hole had astronomers buzzing this year, as it would be a direct opportunity for us to see the black hole ‘devour’ the cloud. The black hole would show us some celestial fireworks and give us a huge opportunity to study their behaviour. Astronomers watched closely, and then the cloud passed right by…. We should have seen the cloud torn apart as matter spiralled...
A Commander Chris Hadfield returns home tonight, the York Universe crew will be focusing on his voyage with a special show, featuring talk of the incredible and inspiring exploits of the first Canadian commander of the International Space Station. Featured in this episode will be an interview with one of the newest Canadian Astronauts, Jeremy Hansen. I was lucky enough to be a part of this interview, and am excited that it will finally reach air time tonight! Also debuting tonight after the York Universe episode, will be my second ‘What’s The Latest?’ podcast, entitled ‘Supernova part 1.’ Find it in...
