Last February I was giving a 101 Astronomy class early in the morning. It was Friday, the 15th. Just by chance, I was talking about the minor bodies of the Solar System when we started speaking about impacts on Earth. I showed some slides of the Tunguska event and how the devastated area was similar […]
The greenhouse effect is possibly one of the scientific topics most frequently covered by the mass media. When reading the news, it is very often difficult to separate ideology from the purely scientific content. However, the greenhouse effect has a profound and direct impact on the planet where we live and, also, in other potentially […]
TW Hydrae is a peculiar star. Although it is not bright enough to be visible to the unaided eye, it is relatively close to us, just 180 light-years away, and this makes it the closest T Tauri star in the sky. A T Tauri star is a solar system being born, they are still to […]
Saturn is truly a weird place. Apart from having quite a peculiar thermal history and one of the most interesting satellites in the Solar System, this planet displays arguably the most fascinating meteorological phenomenon ever seen. Suppose for a moment that next spring a storm raises in your hometown. Nothing unusual to care about, probably […]
Now that Saturn is visible in the sky at dusk, it is fairly easy to spot its biggest satellite Titan with a small telescope. Don’t expect nothing more than a bright point in the sky but it is provocative to imagine the Huygens probe descending into its thick atmosphere in the beginning of 2005. It […]
All of the giant planets of our Solar System, except Uranus, emit more energy in the long wavelengths than what they receive from the Sun in the short wavelengths. This excess of energy was generated in the early stages of the planetary formation and it is being radiated slowly to space as the planets keep […]
Almost four years after being launched to space, the Herschel Space Observatory ran out of helium the past April 29. This implied losing the ability to stay as close as possible to absolute zero (at about 2K, indeed) which also meant the death of the spacecraft, since this mission was designed to observe the universe […]
There are some science news that appear recursively in the media. Just to stick to my field of knowledge we could point to Mars’ water and habitability of extra solar planets. It is certainly great to have people reading about those topic, although some confusion seems to have settled down among public opinion. I am […]
Poles are truly interesting places for planetary scientists. On Earth, the southern pole and its low surface temperatures sustain a polar vortex, most famous for the related hole in the ozone layer. On Saturn, for example, both poles have astonishing structures, including a hexagonal wave in the northern hemisphere. Not surprisingly, Venus also has something […]
The Kepler mission is gazing at the Universe. Every little twinkle in more than 150,000 stars is being recorded since 2009, looking for planetary transits. And this will continue for at least three more years, giving us insight into the wondrous nature of the planetary systems in our galaxy’s vicinity. So far, we had witnessed […]