It’s been cold lately. The temperature has fallen somewhere between Hoth and Pluto, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to change any time soon. It seems we complain about the weather no matter the season. It’s too hot, too cold, too wet, too dry, too bright, too dark. We do have a lot of variation in the seasons, but compared to some other planets, Earth is pretty mild in its climate. One such case is the recently discovered Kepler 432b. A massive planet six times heavier than Jupiter with a comparable size, it orbits closer to its parent star than Mercury...
The Milky Way Galaxy has about 26 associated satellite galaxies, which is strange to imagine, since we think of a galaxy as a massive collection of Billions of stars. The dwarf galaxies are not easily visible since they are small, so they tend to blend in with the background of Milky Way stars that are much closer. You might also notice from the above image that the dwarf galaxies are distant, lying beyond the 100,000 light year scope of our large spiral home. Most of them likely originated in the turmoil of protogalaxy collisions that occurred billions of years...
New research using the ESA’s Planck telescope has revealed that the first stars to shine in the universe sprouted up 100 Million years later than originally thought. Studying the universe is like piecing together a 13.8 Billion year story, from the time of the Big Bang to the present. We study objects in the local Galaxy to piece together the present state, and we look further from Earth to see back in time and visit the earlier chapters to determine the long term evolution of the universe. When the universe was 380,000 years old, it was large enough for the...
Today I found a few nice images that I wanted to talk about, and each one revealed something different about the object that was being imaged. I thought it would be a good chance to show everyone how astronomy is really the study of patterns of light, speaking from a minimalist perspective. We learn literally everything about the Universe beyond the solar system from the photons we see. From photons we can deduce the mass, distance, density, composition, behaviour, formation, and evolution of the cosmos. Pretty stellar! (pun intended) Here are some recent images and what we learn from them....
The best ever image of a Cometary Globule has been released by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) from the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in the Atacama desert in Chile. It looks a lot like a nebula right? In actuality a cometary globule is a very specific type of nebula. It’s very faint, and it’s formation is a matter of debate among the astronomical community. A cometary globule is small, containing the mass of a few suns worth of material. Compare this to a typical nebula, which has enough material to form thousands or even hundreds of thousands of stars. The...
As the Kepler Space Telescope continues work on its second mission, the slow trickle of new exoplanet discoveries has begun. In the past few weeks scientists working with Kepler data have been able to identify new planets, and of course the variation continues to surprise us all. Most Recently, Kepler discovered a system of three planets orbiting the nearby red dwarf star EPIC 201367065, which is about half the size and mass of the Sun. The planets are all super-Earths, being only 2.1, 1.7, and 1.5 times the size of Earth and receiving 10.5, 3.2 and 1.4 times the light intensity of Earth...
I thought Hurricanes had powerful winds. The strongest wind ever recorded was a gust up to 400 Kph near a tropical cyclone in Australia. But Earthbound wind has nothing on Galactic wind. Around the time when our ancestors were just learning to walk upright, the core of the Milky Way Galaxy unleashed a blast of gasses and material at 2 Million Kph. Millions of years later, we see the aftermath of this eruption as two massive bubbles of material blown out above and below the galactic centre, at least 30,000 Light Years tall! The lobes were discovered by the...
Space is Big. I say this often, but it is so vast we can’t even comprehend the emptiness of it. We see Billions upon Billions of stars, all taunting us with their shine, seemingly close but completely unreachable. How do we know which stars we should spend our time looking at? We don’t really have the time to scan through each star in detail, so what are the criteria for taking a closer look? Generally we look at a population of stars to gain an understanding of each life stage, and then we look at the oldest and youngest to determine...
I did a short presentation last night for a group of families at a Halloween event. My job was to talk space but make it as spooky as possible and use some Halloween themes for the kids. There really is a fine line between teaching Science and being entertaining, but here’s some of the things I did. Lets start with the following image….What does this look like to you? Did you say the head of a witch? Then yes you are right! This is known as the Witch Head Nebula. A nebula is a place where gas and dust in...
