Bruce Murray Director of Voyager Missions and Founder of Planetary Society Dies at 81

By on Aug 30, 2013 in Breaking News | 0 comments

Bruce Murray 1931 – 2013 On Thursday August 30th, 2013 the world lost one of the most important scientists. A man called Bruce Murray who died at the age of 81 from Alzheimer’s disease. He is most famously known as the director for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. It’s amazing and inspiring to know that Bruce Murray was the man behind the successful Viking landings on Mars, the Voyager 1 and 2 missions, as well as the Galileo mission to Jupiter and Magellan to Venus. Bruce Murray was also dubbed the “Admiral of the Solar System” by Discovery magazine. Interestingly Bruce Murray never set out to be a planetary explorer. He went to MIT through a ROTC program then got his PhD in Geology. He served sometime in the U.S airforce then went to Caltech where he started observing the Moon. Most geologists were focusing on the Moon at that time since...

Sunset Over Dione

By on Aug 18, 2013 in For Your Information | 0 comments

  This is a gorgeous image of a sunset over Dione (pronounced die-OH-nee). Dione is one of Saturn’s moons and is the 15th largest moon in the solar system. If you combine all the smaller moons together it would still not be bigger than Dione. It has a 1:2 orbital mean resonance with Enceladus which means that for every orbit Dione completes (2.7 Earth days), Enceladus will have completed 2 by then. Dione is mostly made up of ice and has a diameter of 1122 km. It is also the third densest Saturnian moon and has the distance of 377,000 km from Saturn (or about the same distance from the Earth to the Moon). An interesting observation of Dione is that it’s front side is facing all the debris that it plows through but it’s backside actually has MORE impacts than its front side. Scientists have speculated that an impact could have spun the moon around 180 degrees...

Methuselah Star: Older than Universe? Not Quite

By on Aug 11, 2013 in Breaking News | 0 comments

Have you ever wondered what star in our record books is considered the oldest star in the universe? Well Hubble Space telescope studied the Methuselah star and retrieved some interesting data. They found a star to be 14.5 billion (+/- .8 billion) years old and it’s located right in our own Milky Way! The distance of the star was calculated to be 190.1 light years away from Earth. Even though there is a large amount of commotion saying it is older than the universe some say it isn’t. There is a margin of error that goes along with predicting the age of a star and for Methuselah star it is about a 800 million year difference. It’s still quite close to the beginning of the universe which is still fascinating and a question that is provoking is if our theory of the big bang is facing danger because this data goes against what we know about cosmology. Nonetheless, the age...

What is a Kilonova?

By on Aug 3, 2013 in For Your Information | 0 comments

What is a Kilonova?   NASA astronomers have found an intense cosmic event called a “kilonova.” A kilonova is an explosion so powerful that it’s 1000 times stronger than a normal supernova. To help put this in some perspective think about this. The amount of energy a Sun (like the size of our own) produces in its 10 billion life time equals to the amount of energy an average supernova produces. Still not helping? Well think about the amount of energy of the atomic bomb Little Boy outputs (the one dropped on Hiroshima) which is 15 kilotons (6 x 1013 joules) of TNT. During the cold war the United States developed a hydrogen bomb with a max theoretical yield of 25 megatons or 1015 joules. To equal that of a supernova you would need about 10 trillion of the most destructive hydrogen bombs. Now that your brain is barely hanging on let’s move away from the...

Young Stars Forming in NGC 602

By on Jul 30, 2013 in Pictures | 0 comments

NGC 602 is a young bright cluster of stars located in the Small Magellanic Clouds. For those of you who don’t know the Small Magellanic Cloud is a dwarf galaxy that is 7000 light years wide (compared to our 400,000 light year width of the Milky Way). Fun fact is that this dwarf galaxy had the unfortunate run in with our beast of a galaxy and transformed into an irregular shape galaxy. It is also 200,000 light years away but it’s one of the closest neighbours to our own galaxy. In the image you can see that the radiation and shock wave from the star forming area in the center pushed away all the gas and lighter elements. It’s a gorgeous photo taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.  

New COSMOS Trailer

By on Jul 22, 2013 in Video | 0 comments

Why Haven’t You Seen the new COSMOS Trailer?     If you haven’t seen the new COSMOS trailer then read no more and just watch the video! COSMOS is a famous series led by my main man Carl Sagan. It inspired so many people like myself to wonder more about the universe. It made me realize how beautiful and awesome astronomy is and how we don’t look up enough. The trailer plays the epic card pretty hard but we are talking about Neil deGrasse Tyson here and the universe! So it seems fairly accurate to make it epic. COSMOS is also directed by Seth Macfarlane  who is a huge fan of science and Carl Sagan. Even though 2014 is a long wait you can still check out all the old COSMOS on youtube   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMJxjYRXYkU

Where Have Meteors Fallen on Earth and What Are the Differences?

By on Feb 18, 2013 in Pictures | 0 comments

 A very common question we all ask is where have meteors fallen on Earth? Also how big are these rocks or how heavy are they? These are good questions to ask to know the real danger of these space travellers. Well I took this first image from a cool facebook page called The Earth Story, check them out if you have time.   VERY KNOWN METEORITE FALL ON EARTH This map shows every meteorite fall on Earth that we know about; where scientists have found either meteorites or impact craters. Some of these craters and meteorite fragments date as far back as the year 2,300 BCE. The data for the image is from the US Meteorological Society and does not show places where meteorites might have fallen but no trace has yet been found.To view the interactive map, where you can click on each meteorite spot to learn more, go here: http://bit.ly/Xmuvy5   The data used for the image is available...

The Four Armed Spiral Galaxy M106

By on Feb 17, 2013 in Pictures | 0 comments

  This is the gorgeous spiral galaxy M106 or also known as NGC 4258. It is located 23.5 million light years away and it would take you 80,000 light years to cross from one end of the galaxy to the other. What is interesting about this particular galaxy is the fact that it has an unusual amount of arms. It has 4 arms that are in spiral formation and the two arms that are mostly red (known as anomalous arms, because they don’t line up well with the other arms) is hydrogen that is spewing out from the supermassive black hole. That red color is also an indicator to astronomers that the hydrogen is excited. So what is causing all this excitement? The jets coming from the supermassive black hole are likely to be caused by matter falling into it then the beam of cosmic death rays shoot out and excite the material around it. This is not a galaxy you would want to fly anywhere near because...