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...
I always love to chat about stories by close-to-home scientists. I just talked recently about some University of Waterloo cosmological work, but today I can follow it up with a very close to home scientist that I’ve run into a few times. Something about seeing the achievements of those you know makes you feel pride too – it gives us all a good reason to support friends, colleagues, and even acquaintances, since we can share in their passion. Astronomer Lisa Esteves, a PhD candidate from the University of Toronto, has been watching exoplanets carefully with the Kepler Space Telescope, seeing...
Solar Flares happen, especially during the current peak of solar activity. Here’s a cool video from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO).
The Dawn space craft has finally begun its science phase after settling into a 13,500 Km orbit around the dark dwarf planet Ceres. It took some manoeuvring to get it in the right spot, but now it has begun mapping the surface as it slowly orbits once every two weeks. A lovely mosaic image from the space craft is the latest jaw-dropping picture of the former asteroid. Like a great shot of the Lunar terminator, by seeing the shadows created by the light from the Sun, we can get a sense of depth of the heavy craters on the surface....
The two major solar observatories, SDO and SOHO, both saw a massive solar event in exceptional clarity. Starting April 28th, a huge solar plasma loop broke away and was blasted millions of miles out into space from the surface of the Sun! This massive outburst of energy comes during the peak of the 11-year solar activity cycle, and shows us just how incredible and energetic our home star can be. Solar filaments like the one that broke away are long chains of solar plasma, a state of matter where super-heated gas becomes stripped of its electrons. The plasma filaments follow...
As the inevitable launch of humans to Mars slowly approaches over the coming decades, we are using our best technology to study our neighbour in detail. With multiple orbiting satellites and ground surveyors, we are slowly learning more about the geology, climate, environment, and history of Mars. It feels as if every new discovery is a surprise, and we never expected Mars to be such a dynamic and complex world. With science and technology improving every year, humanity is focussing efforts on the red planet. The latest incredible discovery comes from radar data from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The...
On the York Universe radio show this past Monday evening on astronomy.fm, I was having a discussion with another host about how so many things in Astronomy can take Millions or even Billions of years, yet there are still all kinds of phenomena that happen in seconds, hours, weeks, years, or on the scale of human lifetimes. Stars live for hundreds of Millions of years at the low end, yet the intense brightening from the Supernova death of a massive star lasts for only a few days or weeks. It’s as if the Universe is piquing our interest with short...
More than two-thirds of stars are not solitary like our Sun. They are binary systems, meaning they contain two stars that orbit each other about their common centre of gravity. Stars like our Sun are much more rare, and we are not sure what the difference in formation is between binary and solitary systems. Binary systems are much more useful from a scientific perspective, as we can study their orbital period and separation to infer a wide range of properties such as masses and distances. A special class of stars, called RR Lyrae variable stars, have puzzled astronomers for years...
Mercury, the smallest planet in the solar system, and closest to the Sun, is only a little bit bigger than Earth’s Moon. But the Moon is comparatively reflective object. Mercury is thought to be made of the same rock as the Moon, so what is the difference? Why do objects in our Solar system have different brightnesses? The key is in a property called albedo. It’s basically how much light an object reflects, measured as a fraction. For example, the Moon reflects 12% of the light the Sun shines on it, so it has an albedo of 0.12. The albedo...
Yesterday I posted some of my own photos of the Moon and Mars in conjunction from the night before. Last night I went out again knowing that there was another planetary conjunction in the works. The Moon was now with Venus. People on the internet and in person were asking me “Mars? I thought the Moon was near Venus,” and “Venus? I thought the Moon was near Mars.” It really speaks to the fact that most people don’t realize how quickly the sky changes from the point of view of an Earthbound observer. So what happened between the Mars-Moon and...
