Solar System
“Planet Saturn And Its Rings” When you think of Saturn you’d probably instantly think of the majestic rings, yeah me too. But Saturn’s attractions don’t just stop at the rings and the planet, oh no! The gas giant also has a family of extremely interesting moons. From largest to smallest, they are Titan, Rhea, Iapetus, Dione, Tethys, Enceladus, Mimas, Hyperion, Phoebe, …Go To Article
Titan’s Lakes, Wind, Rain, and Water lava …Saturn’s moon Titan keeps its secrets under a red, hazy atmosphere 1,221,850 kilometres from the ringed gas giant. Bigger than the planet Mercury, Titan is one of the most mysterious places in the solar system, full of organic chemistry that has similarities to the primitive Earth just as life was emerging billions of years ago. Titan might share some similarities with Earth, but Titan …Go to article
Jupiter’s Moon Europa, Its Ice Crust, and The Question of Alien Life …Europa gets wrenched and squeezed by the immense tidal forces at work from Jupiter, and the crust splits and fractures. The same cracks may open and close frequently with the push and pull of the land tides. This keeps the ocean under the crust in a liquid form, and it is thought that the warmer water below wells up through cracks in the ice. But even the massaging from Jupiter’s huge gravity can’t melt the 5 to 10 miles of crust, the bone chilling cold of space is just …Go to article
Io, Jupiter’s Moon of Volcanoes and Sulphur Plains …The tiny moon takes a gravity battering from Jupiter and is heated to extremes from the inside out. Io is pulled and tugged out of shape by the giant planet, and due to Io’s elliptical orbit it comes in closer at some times than others. So Io is always in a state of flux, being stretched and compressed. So much so that it actually has land tides. On Earth we have sea tides from the pull of the Moon’s gravity, on Io the land itself rises and fall by as …Go to article
The Cratered Moon …can form when large chunks of rock are thrown outwards from the impact to form smaller secondary craters around the main one. You can spot them as they usually appear in clusters or lines. Sometimes secondaries can be flung thousands of kilometres from the main impact site. Ancient people thought the Moon was a huge mirror that reflected the Earth’s sea and land, others thought is was a bowl of fire in the sky. It was also thought that the Moon was just like Earth and people lived there. It is now thought that our nearest neighbour was …Go to article
A Raging Sun …in about 5 billion years. Up to that point the Sun will get brighter and brighter, at a rate of 10 % every billion years. Eventually the hydrogen fuel in the core will run out and cause the outer layers to expand to 250 times the present radius, while the core contracts and heats up even further. This new red giant star in the Galaxy will engulf the Earth in the process as it’s expansion will cover our orbit, boiling our seas and atmosphere away into space and wiping out all life. In the end the Sun will eventually …Go to article
Deep Space
How Big Is The Universe? The universe is big…really, really big. You have no idea just how gargantuan it actually is. The universe is everything in existence, we think. Unless there are others, and ours is just one among trillions, but that’s for another article all together. Ok, so you know we live in a galaxy called the Milky Way containing a few hundred billion stars of which our Sun is just one. If the Milky Way was reduced to a disk measuring 10 metres in diameter, then …Go to article
The Red Supergiant Star Betelgeuse …monster of a star on a one way trip to destruction in a supernova. Maybe just a few million years old, Betelgeuse has evolved at a rapid rate due to its large mass, it is a live fast die young star. In fact it is so largethat if it was placed at the centre of our solar system, Jupiter would disappear inside it’s swollen atmosphere. At 520 light years from Earth, up to 1,000 times the diameter of our Sun and an unimaginable 10,000 times brighter, Betelgeuse doesn’t do things by halves ...Go to article
Our Barred Spiral Galaxy The Milky Way …251 kilometres per second. It is surrounded by the heliosphere, a protective “bubble” that protects us from dangerous cosmic radiation. This protective bubble is produced by the solar wind, a constant stream of particles blowing out from the Sun. As the Sun and its planets travel around the galactic centre it does not just stay level as it makes its trek, it actually bobs up and down in the 1,000 light year thickness of the Galaxy’s plane. This up and down motion …Go to article
The Crab Nebula, a Site of Destruction …was also visible to the naked eye for 23 days in daytime, and 653 nights before fading away. The Crab Nebula was originally a star maybe 10 times more massive than the Sun. These larger stars tend to live only a few million years, burning up their stores of fuel at a rapid rate…they are live fast, die young stars. This star eventually came to the end of its short life in 1054, when the last of it’s fuel was used up in the core and the star was unable to support itself. At speeds of 70,000 kilometres per second the outer layers fell inwards quickly increasing …Go to article
The Universe …so big in fact that if you stood at one edge of it and shot a laser beam across it, (travelling at light speed…186,000 miles per second), it would take one hundred thousand years to cross it and reach the other side. On a clear night sometimes the Milky Way can be seen as a faint band of light stretching across the sky. This is part of one of the spiral arms, thick with stars, and probably thick with solar systems too. We are looking at it in profile like you would look at a dinner plate edge on. If you could see it face on from interstellar space it would be a spiral, it has 200 billion to 400 billion stars …Go to article
Eta Carinae, a Giant Star’s Path to Supernova …this expanding stellar material is called the Homunculus Nebula and amounts to 10 times the mass of the Sun. This star stuff has been travelling outwards into space ever since 1843, at speeds of 1.5 million miles per hour. In this photo details as small as 10 billion miles across can be seen, about the size of our solar system. The lobes are finely detailed and laced with intricate dark dust lanes. The thin equatorial disk has a totally different appearance, one of material or jets travelling …Go to article
Gamma Ray Bursts, The Most devastating Blasts in the Cosmos …studying them instantly for gamma rays and x-rays. Gamma ray bursts are actually very common and one goes off most days in the universe, but they are all at vast distances away usually billions of light years. Although they happen most days in the universe this makes them actaully very rare because considering the billions of galaxies out there, one a day in the cosmos isn’t very much. So the likely hood of a gamma ray burst going off in an average galaxy like the Milky Way …Go to article
Other Articles
The Hubble Telescope, Two Decades of Discovery …equal to the size covered by a tennis ball at 100 metres away. This was a seemingly black part of the sky with no real objects of interest, or so we thought. Some even questioned it’s usefulness and said it was a waste of the telescope’s valuable observing time. Taking 342 exposures over 10 days, it gazed at the same patch of sky. The weak light coming from galaxies billions of light years away, stretching back to near the beginning of time, dribbled into the Hubble’s sensors, and astronomers unveiled an amazing scene …Go to article
Astronomy Extremes, Objects At The Known Limits …Colder than this temperature is impossible, and at the point around absolute zero, matter starts to exhibit some really strange properties such as superconductivity and superfluidity. The coldest known natural place in the known universe is the Boomerang Nebula, a young planetary nebula 5,000 light years from Earth in the constellation Centaurus. The dying star at the centre of the nebula is expelling material at speeds of half a million kilometres per hour …Go to article
