Gazing Beyond the Stars Last week’s post referred to the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope and a reader asked, “Who is Nancy Grace Roman?” NASA astronomer Dr. Nancy Grace Roman, a tireless champion of the Hubble Space Telescope, became the first woman to serve as Chief of Astronomy at NASA. Her pioneering work laid the groundwork… Continue reading Nancy Grace Roman:
Category: Astronomy
Lone Wanderers
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;” from W. B. Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming.” Imagine a planet without a star to orbit, drifting alone through vast space. Such lone wanderers, known as rogue planets, are planets not bound to any star. Astronomers think a collision with another proto-planet knocked them out of their star… Continue reading Lone Wanderers
New Vistas
The James Webb Space Telescope The James Webb Space Telescope(JWST) has to count as one of the greatest advances in science in 2022. NASA’s giant infrared observatory in the sky is now sending images back to earth. This new perspective on the cosmos revealed unprecedented detail of distant galaxies and the far reaches of space,… Continue reading New Vistas
Winter Solstice
Winter holidays in many cultures originated as ancient people observed the changes in the sun’s height in the sky and the corresponding length of the day. Every day for the past six months the Sun has been lower in the sky and there have been fewer hours of daylight. This past Wednesday, December 21st, the… Continue reading Winter Solstice
A New Hot Jupiter
Discovering Exoplanet TOI-2109b Looking out my west-facing bedroom window on a clear, dark night, I see hundreds of stars, each just a point of light. Many of those stars may be like our sun with a system of orbiting planets. We’ve long suspected that other suns have other planets. Back in 1979, Gordon Walker began… Continue reading A New Hot Jupiter
Two Noons?
A colleague recently surprised me. She posted an item about the recent equinox in a science blog and mentioned solar noon. There’s another kind of noon? Two noons? I always thought of noon as 12:00 o’clock as shown by my watch, though I wondered why a nearby sundial seemed so far off from my watch.… Continue reading Two Noons?