Skywatching
How big is the universe?
The universe has been described as a tremendous amount of space, which we are still trying to understand, contaminated with traces of gas and dust, in the form...
ALMA is a winner
Despite its austere beauty, the Atacama Plateau in Chile is one of the least hospitable places on Earth. It is a 1,000-kilometre strip of land west of the Andes...
Drowning in data
That recent successful experiment to image a black hole produced an enormous amount of data. It all had to be shipped to the processing facility; there was far...
Canada got there first
n the 1960s, Canada was the first country to successfully use a radio telescope thousands of kilometres in diameter. A technique was developed to make multiple...
Dark energy matters
Until very recently, one of the wry jokes about fast radio bursts (FRBs) is that the number of theories attempting to explain them was bigger than the number of...
Cosmic dust in your eyes
Dust might not sound like a very exciting subject compared with, say, black holes, but actually it is. Not only is it the raw material for making new planets,...
A hole in time and space
We have just seen released one of the most important astronomical images in years: an image of a black hole. It shows a black, circular blob surrounded by a...
Searching for aliens
Our planet is surrounded by a sphere of radio waves. That sphere is expanding at the speed of light and now has a radius of about 100 light years. A light year...
Space: the final frontier?
Somebody described space as what stops everything from being in the same place. For a long time that is exactly how we saw it — a void, nothingness, with...
Super-sized solar storms
On March 10, 1989, there was an explosion on the sun. It catapulted a large mass of hot solar plasma off into space at thousands of kilometres a second. In the...
Working on the moon
One day, we will have observatories on the moon. Since the moon has no atmosphere, they will encounter no cloudy nights and all the cosmically interesting...
Back to the moon
After many years, we are on our way back to the moon. Moreover Canada will be part of it. There are many reasons to be excited about the prospect. It marks a...
Storms rage on Jupiter
In 1979, the two Voyager spacecraft flew past Jupiter on their way to the outer solar system. As they shot past, they sent back images of enormous storms. Now...
Women stars of astronomy
Beatrix Potter was interested in the natural sciences and wanted to be a botanist. However, in 19th Century England, it was nearly impossible for women to break...
Over the moon
One of the images sent back by the Chinese Longjiang-2 spacecraft shows the far side of the moon, a monochrome, heavily cratered disc, and in the distance the...
Starry senior citizen
Among the stars of our galaxy, the Milky Way, there is a small, dim red star that is attracting a lot of interest. It is only about 14 per cent of the mass of...
An old, far-flung rock
Our Earth, along with the other bodies in the solar system, formed some 4.5 billion years ago from the collapse of a cloud of gas and dust. Tiny bits collided...
Rivers run through Titan
Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, is, like Earth, a world with an atmosphere, rivers, lakes and seas. However, lying almost 10 times the Earth's distance...
Dancing with the bear
Ursa Major, The Great Bear, is a big constellation. It fills a substantial chunk of the northern sky and looks like a large animal, maybe something like a bear....
Clicks from space
Over the last week or two, we have all enjoyed the media reports describing "fast radio bursts" or FRBs, observed with the new CHIME (Canadian...