Exoplanets are light years away, hidden by their parent stars, and barely detectable. Yet even though most have never been directly imaged, we can study the light from the parent star as the planet passes in front of it, and use this information to learn about the planet’s size and composition, especially if it has an atmosphere. Once you know a little bit about how big and dense a planet is, and the major elements that form it’s crust and atmosphere, you can do a lot of Chemistry to figure out what it should be made of and how these...
Have you ever seen those amazing composite images that people will post, showing the same picture every day or every year for a long period of time. We see how children age, how people transform their bodies, and how their day to day experiences, though seemingly small, add up to incredible changes as the years go by. I personally love time-lapse photography, representing a long period of time in a shorter instance. For me the beauty is showing those changes that are subtle in human experience and communicating them in a way that shows how significant they are when we...
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...
Our planet orbits the Sun. 365.25 days to go full circle (ellipse actually) and bring the seasons to Earth. But the Sun is not really stationary, it’s actually moving through space. It’s orbiting the center of the Milky Way, along with the rest of the galaxy. It actually has a periodic motion as it moves around the Galaxy, slowly moving up above the galactic plane then being pulled back down below by the disk stars. Currently, the Sun is moving toward the constellation Hercules at a speed of around 72,000 Km/h. It is also moving up to the top of the...
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...
How do stars lose mass? For a star like the Sun, it shoots out a swath of charged particles into space and sheds mass at a rate of 4 million tons per second! Though even at this rate, the Sun only loses 1% of its total mass every 160 Billion years, so it’s not disappearing anytime soon. For more massive stars, the process can become complex and strange. The red hypergiant VY Canis Majoris, one of the largest known stars, is about 40 times as massive as the Sun, but humungous in scale. If this star were to replace the...
As someone who is a hobbyist astrophotographer, I’ve got a laundry list of astronomical events to photograph. Nebulas, Galaxies, star clusters, eclipses, and of course, aurorae! Where do the best aurorae happen? Near the north and south poles, so naturally it makes sense to visit those places where there is a bit of civilization, far north or south, with clear skies. The two places that are on my top list, outside of northern regions in my home country of Canada, are Iceland and Norway. Here are some reasons why: The aurora borealis are legendary in these parts of the world....
The Past: Mars has water, and it used to have a lot more. If modern Mars had the ocean it once had, it would evaporate off into space quickly because there is no heavy atmosphere to help keep it pressurized and in liquid form. Mars would have had a thicker atmosphere in addition to it’s magnetic field in order to keep all that water in one place. So where did the atmosphere go? And if there was such a thick atmosphere, how does it account for the fingerprint of excess Carbon-13 and a lack of Carbon-12 found on the red planet...
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...
A couple of weeks ago, using the Subaru Telescope, astronomers from the Carnegie Institution for Science discovered the newest dwarf planet of our solar system, which may end up claiming the title for most distant dwarf planet. The object, which isn’t even confirmed as a dwarf planet yet, is called V774104. It resides a distance of 2-3 times that of Pluto, around 9 Billion Km. It is expected to be a little less than half of Pluto’s size, and it may have a highly eccentric orbit, bringing it closer to the Sun over it’s multi-century trip around the solar system. “That’s...
