Cities call for medic trucks
Hookah lounges hang on
Murderer on the loose
Japan, Canada sign deal
Zelenskyy set to arrive
No asylum for being trans
Manslaughter charge added
Teens held in hit-and-run
Executed for 1996 killing
AI images mainstream?
Fraud on the rise with rates
More pushed to the brink
Warriors await big test
Blazers like their chances
Honouring first responders
Sophie Turner sues Joe Jonas
Brian Austin Green slams ex
Jack Osbourne gets married
Skywatching
James Webb Space Telescope showing how soon galaxies began
One of the objectives for the James Webb Space Telescope is to find out how soon after the Big Bang galaxies began to form, and when stars started manufacturing...
Observatories in space
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is almost at its parking place, 1.5 million kilometres from Earth. It is in full operation, and sending back beautiful...
Radio astronomy has its roots in early telecommunications
Back in the 1930s, radio communication was opening up the world. For the first time it was becoming technically possible for a person in any country to...
New radio telescope to 'see' the stars
A new radio telescope project is under way at our observatory. It is called CHORD (Canadian Hydrogen Observatory and Radio-transient Detector). Flashy acronyms...
'Up there' is like 'down here'
The picture shows Galileo showing a cardinal one of his drawings of the Moon, obtained using his telescope. Another cardinal is looking through the telescope....
Why are craters on the Moon round?
Some of the most important discoveries in science have come from people asking obvious questions—things so obvious nobody before bothered to ask. Sir...
Newton’s telescope was a game changer
Years ago, one of the U.K. observatories had a replica of a telescope made by Sir Isaac Newton in the late 17th century. It was marked "For use in case of...
Students helping shape our astronomical future
Every Friday we hold a Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory (DRAO) science meeting. At the moment, these are mainly done using Zoom. After the usual...
A radio stethoscope on the Sun
Three times a day, a measurement is transmitted from the National Research Council's Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory to a list of recipients around...
Flashes of light from far away stars are like cosmic 'lighthouses'
Sometimes a semi-serious comment turns out to be prophetic. An example of this is related to the discovery of pulsars. We now know these to be rapidly rotating...
Searching for the Milky Way's Black Hole
When we look into the southern sky close to the horizon on summer evenings, we are looking towards the centre of our galaxy, the Milky Way. It is lurking...
Looking at where we came from
Where did we come from? The main science-based ideas propose life on Earth began in shallow, sunlit water, or around hydrothermal vents in the deep ocean. The...
Looking at how our universe will come to an end
Almost 14 billion years ago, the universe began, in an event often referred to as the "Big Bang". At some point in the remote future, we think the...
Venus: From steamy jungle to super hot furnace
One of the demonstrations done for public tours of the (National Research Council's Dominion Radio Astrophysical) observatory (in Penticton) involves a...
Astronomy on the Moon’s far side
The image showed a group of distant galaxies in what would have been beautiful detail. However the image was crossed by lots of white lines, rather like the...
What ripples in 'space time' can tell us
If you have ever sat by a pond on a summer's afternoon, you must have spent some time looking at the ripples. When a fish surfaces for a moment it leaves...
Space telescope spots 12.8 billion-year-old star
The image does not look very impressive, just a faint, somewhat blurry dot. However, that dot is an image of the oldest and most distant individual star we have...
Hard to believe there isn't life elsewhere in universe
We're all familiar with the sorts of alien we get in science fiction movies. They are usually humanlike and often move slowly because the actors cannot see...
Finding signs of life elsewhere in the universe will not be easy
The story in "A for Andromeda", a book by Fred Hoyle and John Eliot, starts with the last-minute tests before the opening of a new radio telescope. ...
Many astonomical discoveries made by amateurs
Today our astronomical tool kit includes telescopes with 10-metre diameter mirrors (or bigger), radio telescope arrays spanning continents, and of course all...
