Tag: astronomy

  • Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from…Venus?

    —

    by

    Brendan Barry
    in ,

    If you didn’t hear the news, scientists have discovered a compound in the atmosphere of Venus. They’ve also ruled out a number of the normal ways the compound is created, and we’re left with two possibilities: some kind of unknown chemistry/chemical process or…aliens. It’s got to be aliens. Because it’s Friday. And because it’s Friday,…

  • The More You Know

    —

    by

    Brendan Barry
    in

    It’s Friday, everyone. And that was a week. And so on the lighter side, here is this work from xkcd about shooting stars. Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.

  • Habitable Zones Around Masses of Light and Heat

    —

    by

    Brendan Barry
    in ,

    But those masses are campfires. It’s Friday, everyone, and we’ve made it to the end of the week. And with the successful launch of Perseverance yesterday, this post from xkcd made a lot of sense. For those that don’t enjoy astronomy, basically stars have habitable zones, or sometimes the Goldilocks zone, around the star where…

  • Lunar Cycles

    —

    by

    Brendan Barry
    in

    Yesterday in the early hours of the morning was technically the latest full moon. And so since today is Friday and we all made it to the end of the week, it seems like a good time to let xkcd educate us all on lunar periodicity. Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.

  • Missing Planets

    —

    by

    Brendan Barry
    in

    In science news, we turn to graphics about planets and things. Specifically we are talking about exoplanets, i.e. planets that exist outside our solar system. Keep in mind that we have only been able to detect exoplanets since the 1990s. Prior to then, how rare was our system with all our planets? It could have…

  • The M87 Black Hole in Context

    —

    by

    Brendan Barry
    in

    Last week we looked at the amazing news that astronomers had finally photographed a black hole. Or, technically, the shadow of a black hole since the black hole itself cannot be seen. I want to return to that news, because it’s awesome. And because xkcd published a piece that annotated the image to show the…

  • Black Holes and Revelations

    —

    by

    Brendan Barry
    in

    On Sunday night I went to see the English rock band Muse perform here in Philadelphia. The concert was to support their latest album, but of course they played Starlight, a song which gave us its respective album’s title: Black Holes and Revelations. Then on Wednesday, scientists announced that for the very first time, we…

  • Asteroids on the Moon

    —

    by

    Brendan Barry
    in

    I hope everybody enjoyed their holiday. But, before we dive back into the meatier topics of the news, I wanted to share this serpentine graphic from the Guardian I discovered last week. Functionally it is a timeline charting the size of 96 known large asteroid impact craters on the Moon, between 80ºS and 80ºN. The…

  • Longest Lunar Eclipse of the Year

    —

    by

    Brendan Barry
    in

    For those of my readers in Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, and South America, you are in for a treat tonight as you get to experience the longest lunar eclipse of the year. For those of us in North America, i.e. Canada, the United States, and Mexico, we get nothing. So for a reminder, we turn to…

  • Jupiter’s New Moons

    —

    by

    Brendan Barry
    in

    Yesterday, space nerds were alerted to the news that 12 new moons have been discovered in orbit of Jupiter. These are much smaller than Jupiter’s moon Ganymede, which is the largest moon in the Solar System and is larger than even Mercury. The point is that there are almost certainly no Ganymede-esque moons orbiting Jupiter…