Category: Solar System

Our solar system

The 1st ‘major lunar standstill’ in more than 18 years is about to occur. Here’s how to see it

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In addition to the April 8 total solar eclipse and vibrant displays of auroras, there’s another celestial treat for skywatchers this year: the first “major lunar standstill” since 2006. During this event, the moon rises and sets at its most extreme northerly and southerly positions on the horizon, reaching its highest and lowest points in the 18.6-year lunar cycle. This is possible because the moon doesn’t follow the same path as the sun. Its rising and setting positions on the horizon change constantly due to the movements of Earth and…

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A massive black hole may be ‘waking up’ in a nearby galaxy

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In December of 2019, the sky-scanning Zwicky Transient Facility — a telescope perched on California’s Palomar Mountain — alerted astronomers to a sudden flare coming from an otherwise unremarkable galaxy some 300 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Virgo. The flare’s intensity dipped and peaked dramatically over four years, but it continues to persist even today. That’s unusually long for such a flare — so long, in fact, that it can’t be explained by any typical cosmic phenomena. “This behavior is unprecedented,” Paula Sánchez-Sáez, an astronomer at the European…

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How 2 quasars at the dawn of time could be a Rosetta stone for the early universe

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A double quasar spiraling toward a great merger has been discovered lighting up the “cosmic dawn,” just 900 million years after the Big Bang. They are the first quasar pair spotted that far back in cosmic time. Quasars are rapidly growing supermassive black holes in the cores of hyperactive galaxies. Torrents of gas are thrust down the black holes’ throats and get hung up in the bottleneck of an accretion disk, which is a dense ring of ultrahot gas that is queuing up to fall into the black hole. Not…

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If we really want people living on the moon, we need an astronaut health database

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Scientists have created the first-ever aerospace medicine biobank to help outline the impact spaceflight has on astronauts’ health. This repository integrates data and samples from various missions, including those performed by SpaceX and NASA, enabling researchers to compare and standardize space medicine findings and apply their results to future missions.  “This represents a breakthrough in the study of human adaptation and life in space,” said Guy Trudel, one of the scientists behind the study and a professor in the Faculty of Medicine at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, in a…

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Life after stellar death? How life could arise on planets orbiting white dwarfs

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Planets could survive the death of their star and become capable of supporting life — and now astronomers are going to go hunting for them. Stars do not survive forever, the sun included. In about five billion years, Earth’s star will begin to exhaust its supply of hydrogen used to generate energy via nuclear fusion in its core. The sun’s core will then begin to contract, increasing the temperature so that hydrogen in its outer envelope can then ignite fusion reactions that will cause the sun — and other stars…

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The universe’s biggest explosions made some of the elements we are composed of. But there’s another mystery source out there

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After its “birth” in the Big Bang, the universe consisted mainly of hydrogen and a few helium atoms. These are the lightest elements in the periodic table. More-or-less all elements heavier than helium were produced in the 13.8 billion years between the Big Bang and the present day. Stars have produced many of these heavier elements through the process of nuclear fusion. However, this only makes elements as heavy as iron. The creation of any heavier elements would consume energy instead of releasing it. In order to explain the presence…

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NASA’s asteroid sample mission gave scientists around the world the rare opportunity to study an artificial meteor

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Earth is constantly bombarded by fragments of rock and ice, also known as meteoroids, from outer space. Most of the meteoroids are as tiny as grains of sand and small pebbles, and they completely burn up high in the atmosphere. You can see meteoroids larger than about a golf ball when they light up as meteors or shooting stars on a dark, clear night. While very small meteoroids are common, larger ones – bigger than a dishwasher – are not. Meteoroids are difficult objects for aerospace and geophysics researchers like…

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This long-studied star is actually a stellar duo: ‘We were absolutely stunned’

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Shrouded in a dense cloud of gas and dust, a young star in the constellation Ophiuchus that astronomers have studied for decades has been found to be a duo. It would also appear that both members of the pair are encircled by a disk of material within which planets may have just begun coalescing. The twin stars, which reside about 400 light-years from Earth in the WL 20 group, are less than a million years old and appear to have pushed away the billowy orange clouds within which they formed,…

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Who is Dr. Kovich in ‘Star Trek: Discovery’? The mystery explained

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With his trademark suit-and-tie an anomaly among the primary-coloured uniforms of the 32nd century, Dr. Kovich always looked like a man out of time. Played by legendary director David Cronenberg — who, like “Star Trek: Discovery” itself, hails from Toronto — Starfleet’s biggest enigma has been an unknowable presence at Starfleet headquarters ever since the Disco crew landed in the distant future. Now, thanks to a major revelation in series finale “Life, Itself”, Kovich’s true identity is no longer a mystery — in fact, we now know where we’ve seen him before,…

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10 top tips for planning your 2027 solar eclipse trip

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Are you preparing for the “eclipse of the century”? Once word gets out about the landmark total solar eclipse on Aug. 2, 2027, you can bet that thousands of eclipse chasers will plan a trip to the path of totality. Perhaps the biggest draw of this landmark solar eclipse is the length of totality, which will reach 6 minutes, 23 seconds. The potential viewing locations will attract many onlookers, with ancient Egyptian temples and Roman ruins within the path of totality. And who can overlook the excellent weather prospects? Whereas…

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