Stars are far apart, especially compared to the everyday distances in human experience. The fastest a human being has ever travelled is just shy of 40 Km/s, and even at that incredible speed it would take 30,000 years to reach the closest star. That is an incredible distance no matter how you slice it. Taking it a step further, most stars in the sky are 20-200 times further away, and that’s just the population of stars we can see. So if we go beyond and talk about galaxies and the distances between them, we are literally talking astronomical quantities. Yet even with...
Ever heard the term ‘champagne flow?’ I’m not talking about a celebration, it’s actually a term in astronomy. When a cluster of massive stars form and ionize the surrounding hydrogen cloud, the hot gas propels itself through the layers of cooler gas at the cluster outskirts. When the hot gas finally bursts through to the vacuum of space, it flows rapidly like a newly opened bottle of champagne. This is exactly what’s happening in the cluster RCW 34, a young, gaseous cluster in the southern constellation Vela. The interesting thing about this cluster is that its nearly invisible in optical...
One of the largest and brightest star clusters in the Milky Way galaxy is the Arches cluster, and its easy to see why. Lying only 100 light years away from the supermassive black hole that lies in the heart of our galaxy, it formed in an incredibly dense environment. It lies 25,000 light years from Earth in the constellation Sagittarius, and contains thousands of massive stars, including 160 that are hot, young, and exceptionally more massive than the Sun. Only 1 in 10 Million stars in the galaxy are as bright as these massive central 160 stars. Though it is...
Of the approximately 100 Million galaxies in the visible universe, we see incredible variation. We always try to classify them based on their shape, size, and peak radiation, but even then we still find others that stray from the usual patterns. In recent years, a new class of galaxies named Extremely Luminous Infrared Galaxies (ELIRGs) has been found with data from the Wide Field Infrared Survey (WISE). Now the king of the ELIRGs has been found, the most luminous galaxy in the universe. The galaxy, designated WISE J224607.57-052635.0, has a luminosity equal to 300 Trillion suns, and may owe its brightness...
Today is the day, 25 years ago, that the Hubble space telescope launched from the Kennedy Space Centre aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery. The world had high hopes for Hubble, but we had no idea what great treasures were waiting for us in the depths of the cosmos. No piece of technology in human history has, arguably, had a bigger impact on our understanding of the Universe. For the 25th anniversary, International Astronomy day is coinciding to tomorrow’s anniversary of the deployment of Hubble, since it usually falls on a Saturday. Events across the world will include arts and crafts, Astronomy demonstrations,...
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...
The science of Astronomy goes far beyond what humans can see with our eyes. The visible part of the spectrum has taught us so much, but when we look at all photons across the spectrum of light, we find exponentially more powerful methods for discovering the mysteries of the universe. Radio waves, yes the same ones that bring you music in your car, are found throughout the universe in very interesting environments. Radio waves often trace the most powerful objects in the universe, such as super-massive black holes, quasars, and other types of active galactic nuclei. Humans see visible light...
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....
Today was the flyby of the big Asteroid 2004 BL86. It can be seen tonight in the sky but you will need a darn good pair of binoculars or a telescope. Here’s where to find it: Scientists have also revealed some new information about it, including updating its size from 550m down to a more paltry 300m, which is still pretty big! Also, it has a moon! Crazy right? Enjoy yet another close shave by a moderately sized Space rock that could have had a devastating impact.
You may know that the Universe is much more complex than we know. If you look at nearly anything in a different wavelength of light, new details can pop up that you’d never expect. Astronomers today use all the wavelengths of light to study the Universe. Even the most seemingly boring objects can come to life in different wavelengths. As a prime example, take the Moon. Now I don’t find the Moon boring at all, in fact it’s quite interesting and has a lot of influence on the Earth, so its fun to talk about. But when we look at...
