Santiago Perez-Hoyos holds a MSc in Astrophysics and a PhD in Planetary Sciences. Member of the Planetary Sciences Group - UPV/EHU since 2001, he has worked on radiative transfer in giant planets' atmospheres using observations from Hubble Space Telescope and Cassini spacecraft, among others. Currently he also enjoys running the T50 observatory at the Aula EspaZio Gela in Bilbao while still struggling with thick planetary atmospheres.
We live in a violent universe. The energy scales involved in many astrophysical processes are enough to stamp out our planet, not to talk about life as we know it. But, somehow, we have been living so far in a delicate equilibrium. Such equilibrium has been punctuated by relatively modest catastrophes that have possibly shaped […]
Let’s admit it from the very beginning: Saturn is my favorite planet, I’m certainly biased when I speak of its wondrous atmospheric activity. In my defense I must ask for any rival to its giant periodic storms, polygon-shaped flows or seasonal changes. At the telescope, Jupiter may look funnier but, in the long-term, Saturn always […]
So, do you think you can tell heaven from hell? Well, David Gilmour does not believe you and, to be honest, neither do I. We use to think always about the Goldilock’s limits, within which the habitability of a system is determined strictly by its parent star distance and temperature. But, even if very useful […]
Some weeks ago I came across a little poem via Twitter (ah, the modern world!). It was authored by Wendell Berry, an american writer and farmer very involved in ecologic farming activism. Let’s meet the poem: To go in the dark with a light is to know the light. To know the dark, go dark […]
We love Mars. Nobody is sure about the exact reason, but we love it. Is it the red color that caught our attention long before the spacecrafts? Or is it the tall mountains and deep valleys they revealed? It is probably a mix of all of the above and much more. It is also the […]
In 2012, some amateur astronomers reported the sighting of an unheard-of event: what was then called a cloud at the Martian limb apparently higher than 200 km above the planet’s surface. Such report received some attention from the mass media, particularly at the internet, but went mostly unnoticed among the professional community. However, the Planetary […]
The Rosetta mission from the European Space Agency is arguably one of the most successful highlights of 2014. Even though the Philae lander did not have the placid flight we all would like it to have, the team managed to fulfill most of its scientific goals before the batteries get exhausted and there is still […]
Let’s start with a thought experiment. We are looking up to a starry night sky. What if we turn off every star in our Galaxy? The heavens would become much darker, but some light sources would still be working. The Moon and planets? Great, let’s turn them off too. Yet another Solar System phenomenon would […]
How far are the stars we see every night? This was possibly one of the first questions early astronomers asked themselves and it is still among the most fundamental problems for present day astrophysics. In some sense, astronomers do build the Universe as the observing methods allow them to place neighboring stars, distant galaxies or […]
Is it possible to have an asymmetric magnetic field when all boundary conditions are known to be symmetric? The question seems awkward but the counter-intuitive reality is always there to make Science far more interesting, as revealed recently by Hao Cao and collaborators . Today’s story is a good combination of intriguing observations and amazing […]