So, if you live in the UK, you know there are two things that indicate Christmas is here: the Coca-Cola lorry and the John Lewis Christmas advert. It's odd to think that the second one has only been going for a few years, yet every year most of us can't wait to see what kind of moving video and brilliant cover song they have done this year.
This year's advert, titled #ManOnTheMoon, is up to the same tear-jerking, inspiring standard as previous years. But to me it's a little bit more special than previous years as it has an astronomical theme to it. The advert follows a young girl who spots an elderly man living on the moon. She tries desperately to get a card and present to him, but nothing seems to do the job. Then, just as you think everything has failed, a helium balloon carried Christmas present starts bobbling along the surface of the moon. Hooray!
Throughout the advert there's some really interesting science and astronomy, which I can't help but look at and wonder how much of it is possible. Could you see a man on the moon? Do helium balloons work on the lunar surface? I've made a video for my YouTube channel going through the science behind the advert, if you're interested in finding out more!
But despite some of the science being a bit suspicious, it's a beautiful advert and it seems to be inspiring people in lot's of different ways. Some people note that the advert is telling us to think of the older, often vulnerable and lonely, generation at Christmas. Others see it as an inspiration for people to get in to astronomy and to get outside this winter and enjoy the night sky. Hopefully it has inspired you in some small way!
Today, on the 29th of September 2015, we have found water on Mars. This is the first time the life giving liquid has been confirmed on another body than our own planet. To say this is one of the most amazing discoveries in science is an understatement. Life has existed on our planet for billions of years, only possible by the liquid water which covers two thirds of our planet. If we are to ever discover life out there in the Universe, the day we first found water on a planet other than our own will be remembered as the first step!
But let's calm down. What exactly has NASA found? Well, NASA has been looking at the large slopes on the surface of the red planet and have noticed something interesting. Using the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, a satellite orbiting Mars, scientists have been studying these slopes and specifically looking at the chemicals present. What they've found is that in the summer months, long trails of salt appear, cascading down the slopes. The cause of this? Salt water trickling down the slopes, depositing the salt behind, before disappearing. The fact these only appear in the summer and disappear in the winter suggests Mars is warm enough in the Summer so that salt water can exist in liquid form. This is therefore evidence that liquid water does still exist on Mars!
Streaks of salt down the side of slopes on Mars are signs of water flow.
But where does this water come from each summer? Well we're still not quite sure, but it could be that the salt itself absorbs the water from the atmosphere. Whatever the reason, water is some how collecting in large enough quantities to create these metre long streaks down the sides of slopes on Mars.
But think back to your school days. Remember when your teacher told you Mars was beyond the orbit of Earth, beyond the goldilocks zone, where less of the Suns energy reaches the surface of the planet. Here, without a thick atmosphere like Earth, any water on Mars is frozen solid. We know this because we can see frozen water ice caps at the poles of Mars. So, how then has NASA found liquid water? Well, some months ago NASA found deposits of salt on Mars and this is the key to the freezing problem. Salt water, like in the oceans on Earth, has a lowest freezing point than pure water. This means whilst pure water on Mars is frozen solid, salt water will remain as a liquid.
We believe that Mars was once covered by a huge ocean of water, millions of year ago when it was warmer. This is far from the case today, but it now seems that at warm points on the planets surface, small trickles and steams of water exist on the surface.
So, if there is water on Mars, is there life? This is a tricky question. We know complex life doesn't exist on Mars (unless there's a colony of super animals living beneath the surface) (which there isn't), but simple life like bacteria is more possible. Whether they could live with such infrequent amounts of water is unknown. The harsh conditions on the surface, a mixture of radiation and extreme temperature, mean that even with a constant supply of water, life might still be impossible.
But this is a problem for another day, today is all about celebrating the discovery of liquid water on Mars. NASA and other space agencies have spent billions of pounds and dollars sending satellites and rovers to Mars, some designed specifically to find evidence of water or life on the red planet. And today all the hard work, by the thousands of NASA and space workers, has been a success. With several rovers still going and even more set to land on Mars in the future, there is still lot's of work to be done to understand this lone little red planet and find out whatever mysteries it still holds!
Want to find out more? Watch my latest YouTube video:
This week I was lucky enough to go to the Cambridge film festival in the UK. I only got to go to the opening night, but I got to see one of their highlight movies, a documentary called STAR MEN. It's a documentary that follows around four British astronomers, all now in their 70's, who all worked as astrophysicists in the USA after their PhD's. The group consists of the physicists Donald Lynden-Bell, L.W.Sargent, Roger Griffin and Nick Woolf.
In the film, the group have all reunited together for a reunion, a trip back to where they worked in America, to catch up and see what has changed. They travel to several of Americas biggest telescopes, ones that they used for their research. They also trace some of the journeys they did during their time in the USA, as they drove off exploring the amazing landscapes.
The documentary was absolutely brilliant. It was amazing seeing what astrophysics research was like 50 years ago. It was also really interesting to see how all of these people's lives have changed over their careers. There's some really funny parts and also some quite sad bits. Overall, the film is a great watch, so check it out if you can.
The documentary doesn't yet have details on a general release, but if you ever get the chance to watch it, it's is brilliant. You can find out more on the film's website http://www.starmen.space/
So, this week on my YouTube channel, I decided to do a video on LISA Pathfinder. Chances are you probably haven't heard of it before, but LISA Pathfinder is the European Space Agencies upcoming mission, set to launch before the end of the year.
But it's a bit unusual, as it's not going to directly be doing any amazing science. Instead, it's going to test a lot of new technology and techniques set to be used on the future ESA mission LISA. So LISA Pathfinder is the pre-mission to LISA (which stands for laser interferometer space antennae).
It might therefore sound a bit boring, but LISA itself is going to try to detect the elusive gravitational waves, first predicted by Albert Einstein that have until now been elusive to us. LISA won't launch for around 20 years, so there's plenty of time to test everything for it and make sure it will probably work!
So, check out my video below to learn more about this really interesting mission!
So I've spent a few hours playing with the Google Cardboard Virtual Reality app of the Rosetta mission. I've pencilled out what I want in the app (though this will inevitably change!) and had a go at the three basic parts of the app I want.
The first part of the app is a zoomed out view of comet 67P. Using the VR headset you can move your head around to look around the comet. You'll notice now that the images appear to have two mirrored copies of each other side by side. In fact, they are slightly offset from each other and provide the stereoscopic view needed to create the 3D view with the VR headsets. I added in lighting and a model of the Sun, meaning you can see what 67P looks like on the bright and dark side. There's also a model of Rosetta orbiting the comet, but it's a bit to small to see in these images.
Next up is a zoomed in view of the comet. I have a few ideas of what I'd like to have on this part, but I'm still fleshing out the idea. In the mean time, I'm enjoying getting views of the close up of the comet!
Finally I've made a model of the solar system. The hope is that in the end I will have a 3D model of the solar system, showing the journey of Rosetta since it's launch. I managed to find accurate positions of the planets from this really useful NADA site (http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons.cgi). I can also get the Rosetta positions which is great, but I need to do some work on loading arrays with c#.
I saw Brian May posted today a stereoscopic image he helped make of comet 67P. It's amazing, but I wonder what he would think of my 3D VR model!
I was trying to think of something to post about today whilst sipping at my coffee on my day off, when I suddenly remembered one of the coolest things I've ever done, which I never posted about. About 6 months ago, I was playing Kerbal Space Program. If you've never heard of it before, it's a computer game where you control your own space agency, creating rockets and exploring the Solar System.
Part of the game allows you to add a logo for your space agency and one of the possible options is to use the NASA logo. However I was sad to see that the European Space Agency logo wasn't a possible option (having worked at ESA for a year I feel passionate about giving them their deserved publicity and appreciation!). So, I half jokingly sent a tweet to both ESA and the makers of Kerbal Space Program, commenting that they should get together so I can represent ESA.
Just seen that the @ESA symbol isn't a possible flag on @KerbalSpaceP, but NASA is. Please add it, it would be so great :)
Except it was! Just a few minute after ESA came back with the thumbs up to use the logo. As you can imagine, quite a few people on Twitter joined in to celebrate our diversifying of space agency logos...
And so, the European Space Agency logo was added to Kerbal Space Program in the next update and you can now represent them with the logo in game. It's great to see two big companies working together. Adding the logo was just a small thing, but it really makes a big difference!
All the worlds doomsayers have been on high alert for the last week as the asteroid 2004 BL86 passed close to the Earth. Of course, when we say close we mean in space scale, which was 1.2 million kilometres, or around 3 times the separation of the Moon and the Earth. The asteroid unsurprisingly passed safely past, as expected (there are many organisations that focus on predicting the paths of asteroids, to watch out for any dangerous ones).
After the panic period, many people were able to spot the asteroid in the night sky last night, which was relatively bright. Such bright asteroids are a rather rare sight, so its always a treat to be able to spot one. But whilst many of us were trying to spot the asteroid with our eyes or binoculars, the team at NASA's Deep Space Network antennae was taking some incredible radio images of the asteroid. Radio waves are reflected off the asteroid which can be seen by the antennae, allowing scientists to see the asteroid even if it isn't illuminated by visible light form the Sun.
The radio images have allowed scientists to measure the size of the asteroid and study some of the details of its surface. But it was one unique feature that they didn't expect to see. The asteroid has a moon! Just as the Earth has a large body orbiting around it, our very own Moon, the asteroid 2004 BL86 also has a piece of rock orbiting around it. It's had to think of a body 1/40th the diameter of the Earth having enough gravity to have its own visible moon. You can see a time lapse of the asteroid above, where its moon can be seen as the bright spot moving down from the top of the image.
But whilst it was a surprise to the scientists that this particular asteroid has a moon, it's not overall a surprise, as many moons have been found orbiting around asteroids in our Solar System already. Still, it's not something we get to see very often, let alone around an asteroid that we can see clearly in the sky.
The NASA spacecraft Dawn, which launched 8 years ago, is finally approaching its final destination, the dwarf planet Ceres. The hard working little satellite has already spent over a year studying the asteroid Vesta, located in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and now is on its way through the asteroid belt to Ceres.
As Dawn has been getting closer to Ceres, it's taken some amazing pictures, one of which can be seen above. This picture was taken around 400,000 kilometres from Ceres, but is getting closer and closer and will eventually take the best images we've ever seen of the mysterious little dwarf planet. But even now we can already start seeing some interesting features on the dwarf planets surface. One of which is the bright spot that can be seen on the planets surface (seen below). We don't know yet what causes this, though it is likely a very reflective area on the surface, reflecting back sun light, but we need a bit more time to find out what it is exactly.
The asteroid belt is the remains of planet formation around our sun, that created the Earth and all the other planets billions of years ago. Leftover material formed the ring of rock, dust and ice that forms the asteroid belt, which in turn likely formed Ceres and Vesta. Whilst Ceres is not a proper planet, instead taking the same dwarf classification as Pluto, it was formed in the same way as planets like Jupiter and the Earth, but failed to sweep up all the remaining material in the belt.
With the NASA New Horizons probe reaching Pluto in the near future, this year seems to be the year of dwarf planets. Hopefully we will be able to get some incredible views of these unexplored worlds and better understand how the solar system formed, all those years ago!
Like most of you, I spent the majority of my life being taught that there are 9 planets in the solar system: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto. We were never really taught much about the planets or how they were defined, so we sat happy in our little bubbles.
It obviously came to a shock in 2006 when scientists decided to re-classify what a planet was. But the logic behind their decision does make some sense. More massive objects have been found in the Solar System along with objects of comparable sizes and shapes. The meeting in 2006 wasn't called to demote Pluto. It was called to decide what the definition of a planet should be. These other objects could have been included and we could realistically today be looking at a Solar System with nearer 15 recognised planets. But the requirement was made such that Pluto and the other smaller bodies were re-classified as Dwarf Planets.
Credit:
R. Albrecht (ESA/ESO),
NASA. http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap990213.html
Whilst the arguments and classification may not have been wholly accepted, it was at least based on science.
But it seems that there has been a revolution happening. When presented with the arguments, a group of people from the general public voted that Pluto should be reinstated at a meeting at Harvard University last week. It seems that many people disagree with the previous decision and want change!
But the meeting raises some interesting points. A large part of the argument to re-instate Pluto seems to come from a cultural and historical viewpoint. Pluto was considered a planet for 76 years, it seems wrong to suddenly change this. But the best thing about science is it's lack of opinion. Science is based on facts, statistics and logic. It was these tools that were used to change the status of Pluto and it's these tools that should be used for everything in science. When it was discovered that the Earth wasn't the centre of the solar system there was a huge uproar from people who believed it went against their religion, but now we look back at this and laugh (hopefully!).
So it may be that some day the definition of a planet is revisited and perhaps changed. But I just hope that this is due to scientific reasoning and not people feeling sorry for a giant piece of rock in space...
Galaxies are like islands in the universe. They are the giant collections of stars, planets, gas, dust, black holes and the elusive Dark matter, that are dotted throughout the universe. They are often separated by millions of light years from their nearest neighbours with not much in-between. As we sit inside our galaxy, the Milky Way, it is often difficult to remember that we are just like one of those distant galaxies.
But every galaxy is unique. The Milky Way forms stars like most galaxies, contains the same things and are in general a very 'vanilla' galaxy, yet events throughout the life of the Milky Way has changed and shaped it to make it different from every other.
One of the most recognised difference between galaxies is their shape. This can be seen if you simply look at galaxies. Many of us if told to draw a galaxy would draw a big disk with spiral arms stretching out from the centre, because this is often the type of galaxy we see most in images (probably because they are the most stunning to look at). But these Spiral galaxies are not the only inhabitants of the universe. Giant spherical Elliptical galaxies with bulges of stars at the centre dominate the universe, containing the majority of all the stars. These galactic giants are very different from the beautiful spirals, both in looks and properties, on average forming much less stars and typically being much less active. Then there are Irregular shaped galaxies, those that look like no other due to their disturbed shapes. These can be elongated, squashed or take some shape that barely looks like a galaxy any more.
An elliptical galaxy.Credit:
J. Blakeslee (Washington State University
But why are there different shapes of galaxies and what causes them. Well we think it might be due to how galaxies interact with each other. It's generally accepted that Irregular galaxies are the result of merging galaxies and it's thought that Spirals in some way evolve in to Elliptical galaxies. But no one really knows how this happens and is one of the biggest mysteries is astrophysics. But as my research is trying to understand this problem, I should probably stop writing this post and get back to work!
A Spiral Galaxy. Credit:
Image: European Space Agency & NASA
At some point in your life you've probably experienced the holiday headache. Where should we go this for our summer getaway? The south of France, Disney land Orlando, the Great Barrier Reef? Wherever you go, at least you know you will have a great time. The risks involved are pretty small.
The team behind European Space Agencies mission Rosetta aren't have such an easy task though. Rosetta made contact with the comet 67P-C/G this month. An incredible mission that will study a comet in close detail. It will hope to learn more about what comet structure and composition is as well as learning about the early solar system. It is currently orbiting around the comet, studied the outside of it. But the really exciting part of the mission will happen in November when the lander part of the mission Philae will land on the comet to study its surface.
We don't know much about the surface of comets, but what we do know is very general and is likely to vary from comet to comet. This is worrying for the team that has to land and attach Philae to the comets surface. They would like to land it somewhere stable enough for the lander to remain for the entire mission, somewhere it is unlikely to get damaged, somewhere where it can access the surface of the comet and look as deep in to the centre as possible. The amount of sunlight the lander receives is also vital, ruling out many areas of the comet already due to its spin and unusual shape. This is not your usual holiday headache of where do you go, this is a comet conundrum!
The surface of the comet has been studied for the last couple of weeks since Rosetta has been orbiting the comet and scientists will officially announce in the next week the landing site they have chosen. We will then all keep our fingers crossed for a successful landing in November for what will be an incredible feat for space exploration.
Artist impression of Philae on the surface of 67P/C-G. Credit: ESA/ATG medialab
You can read more about this on the ESA website:
http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2014/08/21/landing-site-selection-the-race-is-on/
