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![]() Ken TappingCastanet |
The interior of the sun is threaded with huge ropes and tubes of magnetic fields, loaded with very hot plasma—gas so hot its atoms are losing their...
Over the last few years, the term "Goldilocks zone" has come to be widely used to describe the range of distances from a star where its planets would...
We were pretty sure even before the first lander grounded on Mars, the red colour of the planet is due to a lot of iron oxide in the rocks and sands...
One of the more poignant moments in the movie Star Wars, is when Luke Skywalker gazes wistfully into the sunset on the planet Tattoine. What makes the...
I don't usually compare what we see going on out there in space with mediaeval ritual, but in this case it is hard to resist. Astronomers have found...
Imagine, the house needs $10,000 worth of repairs and you have no money to spare for it. You go to the bank and borrow $10,000. That means you can go...
"But I am as constant as the Northern Star", says Julius Caesar in the play Shakespeare named after him. He was making a strong statement that he was...
Our planet is surrounded by a magnetic field that acts as a shield. It keeps the solar wind away from the top of our atmosphere, preventing it from...
Thousands of years ago, our ancestors noticed that most stars were located in fixed patterns. Those patterns moved slowly east to west during the...
The crew of an alien spacecraft entering the Solar System, maybe looking for planets bearing alien life, would be struck by three things about...
Nothing lasts forever, even galaxies, and maybe even universes. The James Webb Space Telescope has just observed the oldest dead galaxy, that is, one...
The radio telescope at the Algonquin Radio Observatory, located in Algonquin Park, Ontario, is typical of the radio telescopes built around the world...
Canadian radio astronomy started directly after the Second World War. Arthur Covington, a scientist with the National Research Council, worked on...
Einstein was not happy. In the early years of the 20th century, he came up with his General Theory of Relativity, an important part of which was a...
The recent lunar eclipse was spectacular. From here on Earth, small telescopes showed the Earth's shadow moving slowly across the Moon's surface,...
TRAPPIST-1 is a red dwarf star about 40.7 light-years away from Earth. It is of particular interest because it has seven earth-like planets orbiting...
It might be surprising but two of the most important discoveries in radio astronomy were made by accident. Maybe, just as surprisingly, they were made...