The environment on the moon is pretty boring. Rocks, dust, and craters as far as the eye can see in all directions. Untouched for billions of years, save for meteors and a few recent visits by a blue neighbour. In 2009, the cold, dry surface of the moon was found to harbour trace amounts of water. Now, less than a decade later, the first map of lunar water has been produced. The map was produced with data taken by NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper, which flew aboard India’s Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, the craft that discovered the water in 2009, along with a similar...
One of the most surprising and intriguing finds during the decade-long Cassini mission has been the discovery of geysers on the Moon Enceladus. Originally spotted in 2005, scientists have spent the last decade trying to understand how they work. And now they finally have a working model. How does an eruption on a frigid Moon last so long? Eruptions on Earth are not long-lived, and if they are, they are very spread out. For Enceladus to have a ton of localized geysers in the South polar region, you need some pretty specific scenarios. Aside from the fact that a constant stream of material could clog...
NASA has been zeroing in on certain features of dwarf planet Ceres and looked at them in more detail. Here are the most surprising as well as what we know so far. There are a few other great videos in this playlist, but the first one gives a great summary of what has been seen so far. The most surprising and interesting feature of Ceres in my opinion has been the Occator crater. With the enigmatic bright spots that have been observed since the Dawn spacecraft approached Ceres, we are seeing them in finer detail than ever before, and we...
Out of the over 2000 confirmed exoplanets, not one has been seen in the conventional sense, where we would see it’s surface, map out features and colours, and understand it’s atmosphere or surface from what we saw. Instead all the knowledge we have of exoplanets is based on the light we see. How big is the dip in the Kepler Telescope’s light curve? What absorption features do the reflected light of this planet show? This information is the result of careful analysis and brilliant inference, since the planets themselves are immeasurably tiny and hard to spot next to their giant...
Occasionally it’s strange to see photos from the Curiosity Rover on Mars. Some of them feel distinctly like home. I can almost imagine a person walking by on the soft sand, through the pathway of rocks, and over the horizon, like a traveller navigating the desert. The latest panorama of Mars gives me that feeling in spades. And yet, this rusty world has too thin an atmosphere to allow a human to breathe. It has no water to drink, and intense radiation from the Sun that prevents life from blanketing its surface. It is human, and yet alien. No homo...
The Deep Space Climate Observatory (DISCOVR) was launched back in February of this year. Although its goal is to measure solar wind particles from the Sun as a space weather predictor, DISCOVR passes the orbit plane of the Earth and the Moon twice per year. In its first pass, it snapped an amazing series of frames of the Moon passing in front of the Earth. The images show the dark side of the Moon, as well as the stark contrast between the darker lunar surface and the bright Earth. The camera that took the shots, the Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera...
I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase ‘extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.’ Such is the case with the search for life. Any scientist who finds direct evidence for the existence of extraterrestrial life had better be sure. And then once they are sure they had better find too much evidence because people will still not believe them. It’s because alien life would be such a monumental, paradigm-shifting discovery, and our entire way of life and system of beliefs would be compromised. For this reason, I simply shake my head every time I see some sensationalized news article about the ‘potential for...
It’s not fuzzy caterpillars or any small creatures interacting in a Petri dish. The strange growing and twisting creatures are not creatures at all. Today’s NASA APOD shows a time lapse view of a cluster of sunspots as they pass along the surface of the Sun during its rotation. The total time is about 12 hours for the sunspots to cross the solar surface, yet the video is shortened to a quick minute and a half. The amazing thing to notice is the amazing dance of the sunspots as they shift, twist, merge, separate, and interact with the granular convection cells...
The surface of the Sun is around 5500 degrees Celsius. It’s hot, and it’s a completely different state of matter than the solid, liquid, and gas states that we are used to. However, this is a pretty balmy temperature compared to the solar atmosphere, which is heated to over a million degrees. But how does it get so hot compared to the surface? We know the core of the Sun, where fusion happens, is where temperatures can reach 14 Million degrees, but how is that energy radiated outward? And more importantly, how does it bypass the solar surface and make...
The Moon has clearly seen some stuff. It’s visibly heavily cratered across it’s surface, which has remained unchanged since it’s surface solidified 4.2 Billion years ago. Think about that – the Moon has been the same, with the exception of cratering, for 4 Billion years. This is a stark contrast to the Earth, whose erosion and tectonic activity cause the crust to change on scales of a few hundred million years. Astronomers have worked hard to learn about the early solar system by looking at the Moon and its cratering patterns. Most of the visible craters on the Moon are...
