Nothing routine about stop
Full RCMP pullout unlikely
Hospice may fight cut
All BC News
NAFTA 2.0 better than none
A look at pandemic plans
2 more in Tory leaders race
More Canada News
Riot death toll climbs
Iran increasingly isolated
Virus reaches Latin America
More World News
Lowe's disappoints in sales,
Markets reverse some losses
Data breach cost $108M
Vees ready for post season
Sharapova hangs up racket
Rockets eke out victory
Kim and Kourtney dust-up
Gunfire at Diplo gig
Sheeran ticket touts jailed
Skywatching
Pulses from deep space
In the 1930s, we first started running high power radio transmitters at wavelengths that can penetrate the ionosphere and escape out into space. So today, any...
How big is the universe?
This might sound like the ultimate unanswerable question, but thanks to astronomical knowledge accumulated over many centuries, and the power of modern...
Twisting space-time
Twenty or so years ago, the radio telescope at Parkes, Australia, found something unusual: a white dwarf star and a neutron star in close orbit around one...
The space junk hazard
Back in the late 1950s and early '60s, when our first artificial satellites were put into orbit, we didn't pay much attention to what went with them. ...
Living on the far side
The Earth's gravity pulls at the side of the moon closest to us more strongly than it pulls at the other side. Long ago, when the moon was still hot and...
Can we believe our eyes?
In some way or other, our eyes have been strongly involved in almost every scientific discovery we have ever made. Despite this they are pretty awful measuring...
Whistles from space
In midsummer, quite a few years ago now, an ionospheric physicist friend and I were in a car parked on a remote logging road in Algonquin Park, Ont. On the...
Beetle Juice will die soon
Orion, The Hunter is one of the most spectacular constellations in the winter sky. The easiest way to find it is to start at the brightest, fiercely sparkling...
A new sort of astronomy
As we sit on the threshold of a new decade, it is interesting to pick what was the most significant astronomical development of the last one. Considering what...
Tasting the water
One of the most ludicrous ways in which to encounter extraterrestrial life was in a comic I read a long, long time ago. The astronauts were on Mars, and an...
A celestial crab
On dark nights this time of year, the southern sky contains one of the most fascinating objects in our galaxy, the Crab Nebula. This object is so intriguing and...
Telling aliens where we are
An alien spacecraft coming into the Solar System would have no trouble finding us. All they would need is a radio. For more than a century, we have been...
Binoculars for Christmas
The range of things available to backyard astronomers is now, er, astronomical. Choosing presents for the family astronomer is more complicated than ever. That...
Oxygen on Mars
The most powerful tool we have for searching for life on other worlds is to look for its chemical signatures in their atmospheres. There are chemicals that are...
Underground astronomy
We put our radio telescopes in valleys that screen them from manmade interference, but where there is a good view of the sky. Our optical telescopes get put in...
The universe has a skeleton
We have known about Dark Matter and Dark Energy for at least a decade, but, as yet, still have no idea what they are. To make the issue worse, these two...
Mercury transiting the sun
On Remembrance Day, Mercury, the closest known planet to the sun, will cross the solar disc. Observers will see a small, round disc move slowly across the sun...
Double star on Luke's world
There is a scene in the first Star Wars movie where, on the desert planet Tatooine, Luke Skywalker watches the setting of twin suns. Was this scene realistic?...
When is the moon full?
If you have never watched the full moon rising above the hills on the other side of a lake, you really need to do something about that. It is beautiful and...
Saturn is the moon king
Researchers using the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii have found 20 more moons orbiting Saturn. This brings the total orbiting the planet to 82, overtaking Jupiter,...
