Category Archives: Planet

Marvellous Mars Castletown House Ireland

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  Castletown House is a Georgian palace set in a magnificent landscape in Co Kildare.  The building is full of grace and elegance of times long past . That splendour coupled  with all that is required of a  building for public events makes Castletown House a special place. It was a pleasure to be invited to do a workshop in this excellent venue.  Particularly timely as it was on the eve of the launch of NASA’s InSight mission. The evening was set up for my Marvellous Mars drawing workshop. The  audience were families , mams, dads and children, a perfect combination. It was a beautiful, with late warm sunshine , a powder blue sky over the greenest of green trees. Flowers, shrubs and land stretching out over 120 acres that seemed to go on forever It occurred to me that perhaps my audience might be small due to the pleasant weather and bank holiday. However 42 people arrived , sat … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Planet Nine

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This entry is part of 161 in the series Across the Universe

This column first ran in The Tablet in April 2016; this has been slightly edited. Planet Nine, whose possible existence was first broached in January 2016, has become a hot topic of speculation. By April of that year, one tabloid announced that comets perturbed by Planet Nine would soon lead to the demise of life on Earth! (Astronomer Phil Plait ran an amusing rebuttal in The New Scientist.) But, is there actually a Planet Nine? Recall, an Astronomical Unit (AU) is the distance from Earth to the sun. From the sun to Neptune, the farthest known planet, is 30 AU. Pluto is but one of a thousand balls of ice orbiting between 30 to 50 AU. But in 2003, Mike Brown and his team at Cal Tech found a body they named Sedna whose orbit comes no closer to the Sun than 76 AU, and which actually arcs out to nearly 1000 AU. It’s hard to imagine how it could … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Original Proof

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This entry is part 138 of 161 in the series Across the Universe

First published in The Tablet in February, 2005… and on The Catholic Astronomer several years ago. Note that Spirit and Opportunity, originally designed to be a 90 day mission, have now been in operation for more than 5000 days! In January [2005], the Opportunity rover that has been trundling across Mars came upon a pitted lump of iron and nickel, about the size of a basketball. The rover’s chemical tests confirmed that it had found an iron/nickel meteorite, a stray bit of a broken-up asteroid fallen from the sky, with a composition like those that have fallen onto the Earth. A lump of metallic iron is not what one would expect to find on Mars. The Martian atmosphere is rich in carbon dioxide; the oxygen from that carbon dioxide, and from the water we now know once flowed on the surface, should be enough to turn metallic iron into a rusty pile of iron oxide. And in fact, oxidized iron … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Giving and Receiving (Where Credit Is Due)

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This entry is part of 161 in the series Across the Universe

This column first ran in The Tablet in February 2017 A paper just posted online by two Caltech astronomers describes observations at an 8-meter telescope of more than 300 faint TNOs (Trans-Neptunian Objects), small lumps of ice orbiting out beyond Neptune. These are leftover chunks of the materials that went into the planets, witnesses to the events that formed our solar system. The shapes of their orbits tells us how the large planets near them have pulled on their paths over time; patterns in the evolution of their surfaces hint at events in our solar system over the last four billion years. Nearly twenty years ago I started working on just such observations with Steve Tegler (Northern Arizona University) and Bill Romanishin (University of Oklahoma). Back then, Steve and Bill had first noticed that the first handful of TNOs they’d observed didn’t show a range of colors but rather fell into two distinct color classes, red and gray. Looking for … Continue reading →

Hubble Finds Substellar Objects in the Orion Nebula

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In an unprecedented deep survey for small, faint objects in the Orion Nebula, astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have uncovered the largest known population of brown dwarfs sprinkled among newborn stars. Looking in the vicinity of the survey stars, researchers not only found several very-low-mass brown dwarf companions, but also three giant planets. They even found an example of binary planets where two planets orbit each other in the absence of a parent star. Brown dwarfs are a strange class of celestial object that have masses so low that their cores never become hot enough to sustain nuclear fusion, which powers stars. Instead, brown dwarfs cool and fade as they age. Despite their low mass, brown dwarfs provide important clues to understanding how stars and planets form, and may be among the most common objects in our Milky Way galaxy. Located 1,350 light-years away, the Orion Nebula is a relatively nearby laboratory for studying the star formation process across … Continue reading →

Spectacular Cassini – Exceptional Drawings

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Space Week 2017 and Science Week 2017 merged in a flurry of drawing workshops. Hundreds of children took part in  Spectacular Cassini at Saturn. The workshop was of course inspired by the sublime images taken by the spacecraft as well as telling the story of the mission. Because I could not go to a shop and buy a Cassini spacecraft or a Huygens probe I made my own models.  Saturn and is rings was also part of my project so I made a model that could fit in my car.  It had to be light  and looked reasonably like the planet itself.  In my experience having a model of the subject in the classroom really helps to engage  children in the subject. In almost all of the workshops the children  asked to hold the spacecraft. That was fine with me but resulted in the communications dish , main engines and thrusters  falling off from time to time. A repair kit … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Comet Tales

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This entry is part of 161 in the series Across the Universe

This column first ran in The Tablet in November 2013 Comets, according to comet-hunter David Levy, are like cats. They both have tails; and they both do whatever they want. People my age remember Comet Kohoutek, which came with a tremendous build-up in 1973 and turned out to be a major disappointment. It had been discovered quite far out in its orbit, with about a year’s lead time; we’d assumed that anything bright enough to be seen so far in advance would probably be spectacular by the time it arrived near Earth. It wasn’t. (I actually did see Kohoutek and, as comets go, it was small but pleasant. It was easily seen with the naked eye, if you knew where to look. The only thing wrong with it was the overhype it had received.) Among comet circles, there’s been fear that this year’s Comet ISON (named for the International Scientific Optical Network telescope near Kislovodsk, Russia, where it was discovered) … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Insidious Habits

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This entry is part of 161 in the series Across the Universe

This column first ran in The Tablet in October 2015 G. K. Chesterton once made an off-hand comment in Orthodoxy about the tasks one would expect only an expert to perform, such as “playing the church organ, painting on vellum, discovering the North Pole (that insidious habit)…” That last example always caught my attention. Finding the Pole is a habit? Presumably the North Pole could only be discovered once! But in 1908, when Orthodoxy was published, finding the North Pole was the claim of countless adventurers seeking glory, all of them unsuccessful up to then. (Not that anyone doubted the Pole was there.) Chesterton’s phrase came to my mind this month [2015] with NASA’s latest announcement that they’d discovered water on Mars. Again? That insidious habit! No one seems to have made a firm count, but I suspect NASA must have announced the discovery of water on Mars at least a dozen times over the past forty years. River channels … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Feeding Curiosity

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This entry is part of 161 in the series Across the Universe

This column first ran in The Tablet in October 2012 Finally [in 2012!], a planet has been discovered orbiting Alpha Centauri. That star, a neighbor of the Southern Cross, is actually a triplet of stars orbiting each other – as first discovered by a Jesuit missionary, Fr. Jean Richaud, some 300 years ago. And it’s is our nearest neighbor, merely four and a half light years away. Granted, the new planet orbits so close to its star (the middle member of the triplet) that its surface would be hotter than molten lava. But its existence gives hope that Alpha Centauri could also host another planet at a more temperate location, which we just haven’t seen yet. Unlike other detected planetary systems, you could actually envision a conversation with hypothetical intelligences inhabiting such a hypothetical planet; the conversation lag would be a mere nine years between exchanges. Could we go there? Half a century ago, it took Apollo about a week … Continue reading →

Climate in Kurzynski Country

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I’m sorry to report that a terrific scientific and educational resource, the United States Historical Climatology Network (USHCN), is fading away.  A couple of years back the USHCN stopped updating its database—the last data available are from December 31, 2014.  Moreover, the USHCN recently reported that it was going out of business, so to speak, as of the end of this month.  Nothing lasts in the digital world. In honor of the USHCN’s fine run, and in hopes that it will stick around under some other guise, I present an analysis, based on USHCN data, of the climate in the southern Wisconsin stomping grounds of Fr. James Kurzynski, priest of the Diocese of La Crosse, Wisconsin and fellow blogger on The Catholic Astronomer.  Fr. Jim’s posts reflect an ongoing interest in ecology, and in ministering to and communicating with people who may have diverse views on the subject of climate science.  Fr. Jim and I are “team-posting” here.  I did … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Super Earths

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This entry is part of 161 in the series Across the Universe

This column first ran in The Tablet in August 2015 Half the planets in our solar system are relatively small, rocky, and found near our sun. The other half are all significantly bigger, covered in giant atmospheres, and orbit far away from the sun. Explaining this trend in size and orbits is simple. If the planets formed from a disk of gas and dust (we’ve actually observed such disks around young stars) then planets forming farther from the sun are colder. If they’re far enough from the sun that water in the gas freezes into ice, they’ll jump up in size — a gas cloud has twice as much water as rocky material to snowball into a planet. And once a planet reaches a critical size, it captures gas from the nebula to make a thick atmosphere. So, inner rocky planets stay small; but once the icy outer planets get big enough, they jump up to even larger sizes. The … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Planetary Prejudice

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This entry is part of 161 in the series Across the Universe

This column first ran in The Tablet in July 2015 The wonderful excitement about Pluto, visited by the New Horizons spacecraft [July 2015], has resurrected the old issue of defining a “planet”. But why? Most people approaching this question have one clear goal: they want Pluto to be a planet. Once you realize that, you can make your definition clear and simple: “A planet is one of the bodies that I was taught was a planet when I was a child.” Of course, such a definition is useless for any other purposes. The IAU, which defined Pluto and similar bodies as “dwarf planets” back in 2006, needed a definition so it could name such objects and the features on them, to know whose committee and what set of rules will apply. But there’s another aspect to this issue. Fifteen years ago I was involved in a research program studying the Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNO) that orbit alongside Pluto, comparing their shapes … Continue reading →