Category Archives: Planet

Across the Universe: Tradition… and Pluto

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This entry is part 19 of 173 in the series Across the Universe

The following column was written in 2006, just after the IAU had voted to name Pluto a Dwarf. It ran in The Tablet in August, 2006. We ran it again in 2015, just before New Horizons went past Pluto. Now it has recently come out of hibernation on its way to a Kuiper Belt Object encounter next January. Never mind the 2,500 astronomers attending dozens of seminars and joint discussions about stars and galaxies in Prague; the news of the 2006 triennial General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) was all about the changing status of Pluto. General Assemblies are different from typical scientific congresses. Rather than being focused exclusively on presenting scientific results, the main point here is to decide on all the arbitrary but necessary definitions that let us talk to each other and understand each others’ data. For example, we’re worrying about tweaking definition of latitude and longitude on the Moon to match the the expected … Continue reading →

Turned toward the vastness

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[A version of this appeared at CatholicPhilly.com in July 2010.] On Friday, I walked onto the driveway to call the cat in for the night, peering under her favorite bushes, warmed by the brick wall of the house. I happened to look up. There, on a velvety deep cobalt sky, perfectly framed between two towering trees across the street, was a brilliant Venus and a slim crescent of the moon. The sight took my breath away, so much so that after a moment, I went back inside and pulled my husband out of bed to come see. As I sat on the driveway, watching the moon inexorably slip away, I remembered an evening sitting on a bench outside the Jesuit retreat house on Eastern Point in Massachusetts. The bench faced east, not west, so instead of watching the fiery exuberant swirls of red and gold over Gloucester bay, my view was one of an impending darkness extending further than I … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: By Paper, to the Stars

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This entry is part 170 of 173 in the series Across the Universe

This column was first published in The Tablet in June, 2004, and first published here in 2015… read the end to find out what happened! The people who design airplanes say that a plane can’t fly until its weight is matched by the weight of its paperwork. The same must be true for launching spacecraft to another planet. Last month [May 2004] I took part on a NASA panel in Washington DC, reviewing five competing plans to build a planetary probe; in the run-up to the panel I was shipped 30 pounds of paper to read. NASA’s “New Frontiers” program is a development of another project driven by piles of paperwork: the Solar System Decadal Survey commissioned by NASA and executed by the National Academy of Sciences in 2002. After hearing from hundreds of planetary scientists at meetings around the world (and reading white papers solicited and gathered by various international  societies) a committee of graybeards outlined where NASA should be … Continue reading →

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 160 of 173 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 153 of 173 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 152 of 173 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 140 of 173 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 137 of 173 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 134 of 173 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 →