We are reaching the point in our study of exoplanets, planets orbiting other stars, where the atmospheres of distant worlds are within the limits of our technology. Once we could barely see the wobble of a star, the telltale sign of an exoplanet, and now we can see reflected starlight and study a distant atmosphere. Now we can probe deeper questions, are atmospheres of exoplanets similar to solar system planets? What are they made of? Do other solar systems have the same raw materials as ours? Do they have what we believe to be the raw materials for life? A...
Nebula. Collapse. Protostar. Main Sequence. Red Giant. Planetary Nebula. White Dwarf. This is the cycle of life for a star like our Sun. By observing stars across the galaxy, we see snapshots of different points in a star’s life cycle. It’s the same with people; If you went for a walk in a city and observed people for a day, you would see every single stage of a person’s life: Infant, child, adolescent, youth, adult, middle aged, senior. How would you put them in order if you knew nothing about them? With people you might go up and ask them, but with stars we can...
Data is beautiful. There is elegance in the artful manipulation of data to communicate information. I love to see new ways to communicate science to the layman and give an understanding of the collective human knowledge. So I had to post this timeline of the universe infographic, containing events from the beginning of the universe all the way up to the death of the Sun. This is obviously just the tip of the scientific iceberg so to speak, but some of the highlights chosen cross several disciplines of science and are truly significant events in history. Enjoy the truly beautiful...
What do other planetary systems look like? We have seen some where massive Jupiter-sized worlds orbit closer to their star than Mercury does to the Sun, baking them with radiation. Others have had multiple rocky planets within the Earth’s orbit distance. Some have planets similar to Earth in a variety of locations. But what about far away from the star? We never expected to find gas giants like Uranus and Neptune in the far reaches of our solar system. Are there planetary systems where planets live even farther away? Maybe there are planets that live in the empty darkness between stars,...
The only reason we can see black holes in the universe is because some of them swallow up gas and dust. This heats up material that is spinning rapidly around the black hole as it falls in (called an accretion disk), and produces massive jets of material due to conservation of angular momentum that can be seen across the universe. The energy released in the jets and the energy given off in the accretion disk are proportional to how much gas and dust is being consumed by the black hole. More matter = more food = more energy released. But...
Some of the most gorgeous, ghostly, and variable objects in the universe are planetary nebulae. They are all formed in a similar process, as a low-mass star (like our Sun) sheds it’s outer layers of gas and dust, heating them to a glow as they disperse over hundreds of millions of years. A few Billion years from now, the Sun will undergo the same major state change. When this happens, perhaps other species in the far future will gaze upon it and marvel at its beauty. One of the difficulties in studying a planetary nebula is measuring it’s distance from...
I love living in Canada. We have skies that can be free of light pollution with only a short trip outside the cities, and vast areas of land where you can really get away and enjoy the majesty of the cosmos. I occasionally peruse the Canadian made Skynews magazine, and one of my favourite parts is the section where they showcase the work of Canadian astrophotographers. It gives me hope as an amateur astrophotographer myself to eventually get to that level. One of the local Astronomy clubs I visited recently is the North York Astronomical Association, a group of amateur astronomers...
With the recent story of the star with a debris ring potentially being a sign of extraterrestrial life (spoiler alert, it’s not aliens), I had to talk a bit more about debris rings in general around other stars. How can they exist? When we start to look at the number of worlds and the variability of objects and stars, it would be no surprise to find strange systems where recent interactions have produced all kinds of fascinating patterns. It’s another example of finding art in nature. A group of astronomers from the university of Warwick have directly imaged a debris...
Time is a very slow thing when we talk about the universe. Stars can live for many Billions of years, and over human timescales they seem stagnant and unchanging. So it’s no surprise that when we look at distant galaxies, they don’t appear to change at all over the course of centuries. But appearances can be deceiving. Galaxies do change, more quickly than you would imagine. M87, pictured above, is a monstrous Galaxy of nearly 1 Trillion stars, more than twice as populous as the Milky Way. It looks like a big fuzzy star, and it quite regular in appearance...
Our species is just now reaching the technology necessary to detect features of exoplanets, and not just the exoplanets themselves. We have seen atmospheres, aurorae, and magnetism on distant worlds, and now we can add incredibly fast winds to that list. A team of astronomers have discovered an exoplanet, classified as HD 189733b, that has wind speeds exceeding 8,500 km / h, or about 2 Km / s. Lead researcher Tom Louden, of the University of Warwick’s Astrophysics group, said: “This is the first ever weather map from outside of our solar system. Whilst we have previously known of Wind on...
