Yesterday, (April 08, 2024), a group of friends and I drove up to Vienna, Illinois to observe the solar eclipse in totality. It was one of the best experiences in my life, and I think that getting to see such a beautiful and interesting astronomical phenomena in person is life-changing. Because totality only lasted for a minute or so, I did not feel like trying to take many pictures as the camera does not do it justice!!!! it truly looked like there was a hole in the sky.
is it sunset hour… or is there just an eclipse?? (image credit: me)
It was magical, and especially trippy, that I could see the world get dimmer and feel it getting colder as the Sun got covered up slowly. Observing the Sun slowly get covered with our eclipse glasses was so beautiful. The entire park cheered when the sun got completely engulfed. It looked like sunset hour during totality!!!
HOLE IN THE SKY!!! (image credit: my friend)
I feel so lucky that I got to experience the solar eclipse this year. This might be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, unless I get to see the next one in 20 years.
me watching the sun get covered!!! (image credit: my friend)
Pluto, our beloved cosmic underdog, has had a rollercoaster of a journey in the astronomical community. Once considered the ninth planet of our solar system, it was demoted in 2006 to “dwarf planet” status, much to the dismay of Pluto enthusiasts worldwide. But don’t let its diminutive classification fool you—Pluto is a fascinating world brimming with mysteries and surprises. With its heart-shaped glacier, named Tombaugh Regio after its discoverer Clyde Tombaugh, and a variety of complex surface features, Pluto continues to capture our imaginations and challenge our understanding of planetary science. It’s like the solar system’s favorite little sibling: small, but full of character and unpredictability.
Exploring Pluto is like delving into a cosmic detective story. Its surface is coated in nitrogen ice, with towering mountains and vast plains that hint at a geologically active past. And then there’s the question of its atmosphere: thin and tenuous, yet it expands and contracts with Pluto’s elliptical orbit around the sun. The New Horizons mission in 2015 gave us our first close-up look at this enigmatic world, revealing a landscape more dynamic and diverse than many had anticipated. Despite being relegated to the outer reaches of our solar system, Pluto remains a key piece in the puzzle of our cosmic neighborhood, proving that even the smallest planets can hold the biggest secrets.
Watching the talk about the New Horizons mission made an impact on the way I now view space exploration. There are so many aspects to it detailed in the video I had never thought about before. Over the course of watching the talk, I was also able to fall in love with Pluto!
New Horizons was the first spacecraft to explore Pluto up close. Up until the point the spacecraft reached its destination, the only picture of Pluto was blurry, black and white, and pixelated. With the ability of New Horizons to fly by Pluto, the beautiful images depicting a planet with red dust and a heart shape allowed for the New Horizons scientists to deduce information about Pluto they had never been able to before. The most important discovery of this mission was the realization that Pluto is geologically active! Due to its small size and distance from the sun, it was assumed that Pluto was not active anymore, and would be cold, hard, and covered in craters. Instead, there is so much to explore on this magical planet!
Growing up we always heard about how our solar system had eight main planets orbiting the Sun; Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. But, what if there was another planet? This is known as the ninth planet hypothesis, and no I don’t mean Pluto. It is estimated that it could have ten times the mass of Earth and orbit the Sun twenty times further than Neptune. So, one revolution around the sun is anywhere between 10,000 and 20,000 Earth years!
The reason astrophysicists believe that there is a ninth planet is because they noticed that objects in the Kuiper belt had unusual orbits. Unfortunately right now, there is no proof about this other than just mathematical modeling to try and explain the Kuiper belt’s gravitational anomaly. Scientists hope to utilize the most powerful telescopes known to date to begin searching for this mysterious planet 9. Perhaps we may need a more powerful telescope to find what is beyond the Kuiper belt, but only time will tell.
History is doomed to repeat itself. Will we be ready?
Around 66 million years ago, an object estimated to be around 10km wide struck Earth at incredibly high speeds. The energy released was equivalent to roughly 100 million megatons of TNT. The impact, then, released over 6.5 billion times more energy than the catastrophically powerful nuclear weapon dropped on Hiroshima. An asteroid only 50 meters across exploded 10km above the Earths surface in Russia, 1908. The resulting Tunguska Event left over 800 square miles of forest flattened and windows hundreds of miles away shattered. This small asteroid, exploding far before it reached Earth’s surface, released nearly double the amount of energy as the most powerful hydrogen bomb ever detonated.
The Chicxulub Blast, Wired
Obviously, these sort of incidents are quite rare. But, as a consequence of humanity being a single-planet species, one large enough object could truly erase our entire existence. Thus scientists have been looking into ways to redirect or destroy in-coming threats before they reach us. The Double Asteroid Redirection Test is one such example — the fact that, today, these kinds of things are within our capability is truly astounding. These projects may seem high effort and low benefit, but let’s be clear: when they save the day, there will be no doubt they were worth every penny.
One of the most inspiring ventures in the world of astronomy in the 21st century is the increasing discovery of exoplanets. They represent the most extensive effort to find life outside of Earth. So far, we have discovered thousands of planets surrounding other stars, but there is something of a selection bias. Astronomers use a few primary methods: the first is the transit method, and the second is the astrometry method.
Transit involves measuring the dip in light coming from a star, caused by an obstruction of the light from a planet crossing in front of its star relative to the observer. This has a very strong selection bias in several ways. The first is that only planets that cross in front of the star can be detected. This limits the number of possible systems enormously. The second is that only planets that transit somewhat often, meaning only planets that are very close to their host star can be detected.
Astrometry involves measuring the amount of red-shifting or blue-shifting that is present in the starlight, due to the wobble caused by the gravity of the planet while it orbits. This has a heavy selection bias for large planets that orbit close to their host stars.
So I ask the question, “If someone were to look at the sun looking for planets, what would you see?” And the answer, if you were using current methods, is almost nothing. Nearly all of the nearby star systems are not aligned with the sun’s planetary plane, which means they are receiving effectively no information on the orbiting bodies. The few that are lucky enough to be aligned would be able to detect Jupiter if they had a long enough observation, probably using the transit method. None of the other planets would likely be detectable, because they either take much too long to observe three or four orbits, or they are too small to be detected through either method.
In a certain light, this could be seen as quite liberating. Our methods seem so feeble, unable to detect the vast majority of what is almost certainly out there. But, it also means that other, more innovative methods need to be developed if we want to map the universe around us.
An eclipse occurs whenever a celestial body passes in front of or behind another in a way that whoever is on the surface can notice such an obstruction. Lunar eclipses occur on average twice a year when the moon moves into the Earth’s shadow during the full moon phase, which happens to be the only phase that occurs exclusively at night. Solar eclipses are far rarer, due to the moon being far smaller than the body it obscures or the body obscuring it, and occur exclusively during new moons, meaning it is not positioned in a way that the sun can reflect light to us.
Like many of you I was very excited to see the solar eclipse today. I thought about driving to see totality, but ended up choosing against it as I figured it would be too much, and I had a quiz the morning of. So, I decided to stick around campus and watch it from here. Aaaaaaaaaaand it was underwhelming. It was just way too cloudy to see it consistently. We only got brief glimpses at it. I was able to snap this photo just before it went back behind the clouds. I’m hoping others who went to the area of totality got to see it better. I remember the one in 2017, I was also very close to totality then. It was a really cool experience since there were no clouds in the sky. The coolest thing I remember was that all the leaves made crescent shaped shadows on the ground which made a really cool effect.
For my blog post I wanted to focus on comets. I figured I would do some research on the only comet I knew by name before taking astronomy, Halley’s Comet. Halley is the most famous of its kind and its presence in our history goes back more than 1000 years. Halley was last seen in 1986 and won’t be back until 2061. Edmond Halley, after whom the comet is named, used Newton’s theories to predict the return of the comet based on observations made as far back as 1531 1607 and 1682. In 1758 Halley’s predictions came true and the comet returned. The comet was significant to human history long before Halley named it. It appears in the Bayeux tapestry, a depiction of the Battle of Hastings in 1066. Scientists predict that Halley has been in its current orbit for about 16,000 years. Halley does more than just come by Earth’s view every so often, it is actually responsible for two meteor showers every year. Eta Aquarids in May and the Orionids in October are the result of Halley shedding ice and rock into the inner solar system.
Today was the day, I saw the eclipse. It was amazing, and truly a piece of art. There were lots of clouds and I was barely able to see the eclipse although when seeing it, it was eye burning. Literally. As I had no glasses, I took a video of it that I am very glad to share on this blog. It is not very visible due to clouds, but it is seeable. The vision of the eclipse made me think of the cloudy nebula that we observed for the observing assignment. It was really great, and I wish I would’ve seen the total eclipse. I also read an article the other day on solar eclipses and that animals act unusually weird during this time, and I want to know why as well.You are also able to see the corona of the sun (plasma) as it isn’t viewable during regular times of non-eclipses.
