Think about Earth and its population of over 7 Billion people. That’s 7 Billion people who wake up, breathe, live, think, experience, and interact with each other. The sheer volume of interactions and variation in the human experience is staggering. Every second you are alive these interactions are happening all around you, and far from you in any corner of the planet. Millions of people right now feel sad, happy, ecstatic, broken, angry, tired, energetic, and everything in between. Now if we go beyond to the Milky Way, where there are more than 50 stars for each and every homo sapiens on...
Categorizing objects in the universe can be difficult. The fiasco with Pluto over the last decade is more than proof of that. We generally look to location and then to size as the two main methods for classifying the stuff that permeates the cosmos. Galaxies contain stars, which host orbiting planets, which host orbiting moons; While asteroids fly in between planets and icy comets are wander through the outskirts of star systems. But what about the in-between objects? Often we find strange things in strange places. There are moons in our solar system that are larger than planets. What would...
Looking at the universe in different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum can reveal features and structures that are invisible to human eyes. The vast black emptiness of space explodes into a sea of colour when we use cameras to expand our vision. Looking at a galaxy through human eyes can be a simple and seemingly uninteresting view, but in infrared, microwave, or ultraviolet wavelengths we see the deeper layers of the vast array of stars. The closest large spiral galaxy and a cousin of our own Milky Way, the Andromeda galaxy, is revealed in ultraviolet. The Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX)...
For anyone who actually reads this blog, which based on my stats could be anywhere from 1 person (myself) to 300 people a day, you’ll have noticed I’ve been missing my daily posts for the last week. It was my glorious vacation week, the first one I’ve had in three years, and though I tried and tried, there was only one week that worked out perfectly for scheduling, and it was the one week I didn’t want to miss. In all my planning and preparations, the only week that worked was the exact same week as the historic flyby of...
The Sun, stars, nebulae, galaxies, planets; We can see them all from our lonely cosmic address, but not all is revealed in the light our eyes see. We need to look at the entire electromagnetic spectrum to understand the range of objects we see in the universe. Our closest star shows us how different it can look when you change the observed wavelength. In high energy ultraviolet and X-ray light we can see the most powerful sunspots emitting their bursts of radiation and the swirls of solar plasma releasing ultraviolet energy in all directions. We still have a few years...
Astronomers save up some of their best science for conferences. When all of their friends and colleagues get together it can be a big opportunity to show off and impress the titans of the field. This is why big astronomy meetings generate a lot of science news. This is the third or fourth story I’ve posted about the proceedings at the Royal Astronomical Society’s National meeting this week, and the good science just keeps coming in. Although I had strong opinions about a declaration of potential life on Comet 67P earlier this week, a story from the same meeting, I...
In the last few days, we have watched the intricate dance of Venus and Jupiter in the Western sky after sunset. They have tangoed and passed by one another and the world has watched as the best conjunction of the year has come and gone. Don’t forget that even though they appear close in the sky, Venus is actually closer to the Earth than it is to Jupiter. Jupiter is hundreds of millions of kilometers further away than Venus. Today’s APOD is a beautiful shot by Letian Wang combining the proximity of the two planets with the (much further East...
As is the case with any final approach to a new object, the early images, with their horrible resolution, pixelated appearance, and possibly false features due to processing, lead to significant speculation on what we will see as the craft approaches. It was the same a few months ago with Ceres. I personally love the blurry images. It’s a mystery waiting to be solved, and we see it unfold as we move ever closer to our destination. It also reminds me of the early days of the internet I grew up with, using a good old 28.8K modem and waiting 2...
If there’s one true fact about every single gas giant planet ever observed, around the Sun or other stars in the Galaxy, it’s that they all are mainly composed of Hydrogen. Even though the giants of our solar system such as Neptune and Jupiter seem very different, it is Hydrogen that primarily composes them. The difference is in the details though. The blue colour of Neptune is due to the presence of Methane, and even then it only makes up 1.7% of Neptune’s mass. But Hydrogen is light. Wouldn’t giant planets like hot Jupiters lose their Hydrogen from being blasted...
How do we determine the size of the Universe? How do we know how far away the planets and stars are? How can we measure it without ever being there? The answer, as it always is in Astronomy, is light! More Photons = More Science! Here’s my video explaining the concepts of Parallax, spectroscopic parallax, and type 1a supernovae! Space is big, and although we can figure out how big it is, its another challenge all together to understand and comprehend its sheer size.
