A Quick Q&A

Spiral Galaxy M106 & Spiral Galaxy M83 by Hubble Heritage

Beautiful! Would like to visit all of these places someday <3

World’s largest salt flat: Salar de Uyini, Bolivia

United Arab Emirates’ Plan for a Mars City

It seems that everyone is really starting to get into the race to Mars! The project, dubbed “Mars 2117”, envisions a completely functioning human community on the surface of the red plane by year 2117.

According to the Emirates Mars Mission main website, Mars 2117 is a specific goal that the UAE hopes will encourage international cooperation in space exploration and scientific discovery. This ambitious project also falls under a larger umbrella of aerospace goals that the UAE has set out since 2014 when they first showed interest in entering the space industry. Some of these goals include sending an unmanned probe to Mars by 2021, studying Earth’s atmosphere using advanced technology, and collaborating with scientists worldwide.

The Mars 2117 project is an incredible vision, one that I am excited to see grow and gain more attention in the years to come. While there are many initiatives around the world that aim at reaching the famous red planet, this is the first time that an entire nation has so publicly announced support and planning for such an enormous long-term project, and looks to be moving with forward momentum.

I can only wonder what other nations and organizations are thinking about this concept, as well as marvel at how much attention the space industry has garnered recently. It seems as if there are new technical discoveries and achievements being made everyday, and it doesn’t look like the space race is stopping. With SpaceX and NASA already testing advanced aero-spacecraft for future launches, and the Dutch Mars One Mission currently under progress, Mars 2117 certainly adds more fuel to the fire.

A century is certainly a long time and anything can happen between 2017 and 2117, but I can’t wait to see what happens until then.

ALMA and the center of the Milky Way

via reddit

Beautiful photo! This reminds me of the time my family and I went to Yellowstone National Park around four years ago. We arrived at the park around midnight and were treated to the clearest star-filled night sky we had ever seen. It was stunning - the stars stretched from one horizon to the next, and there was no end to them. It made me feel very small in the grand scope of the universe, and just how much we miss out when we become accustomed to city lights and the urban sprawl. Makes me want to go camping in some remote place again.

The Milky Way from Acadia National Parks Thunder Hole

js

My Constellation

I was born with stars in my eyes.

I mean this in a very literal sense! I was born in an island village that didn’t have any electricity, on a clear moonless night when millions of bright stars unfurled across the dark sky. And (according to my baby pictures) my hospital cradle was right next to the window which afforded a wide view of the ocean waves and – yep, that’s right – the stars. One of my earliest memories is that of the stars, though I’m not sure if that is from when I was a baby, or when I was slightly older.

Nevertheless, the night sky and its bright inhabitants have been constants in my life for as long as I can remember. From as early as my toddling years, I would always make it a point to my parents to let me stay outside long enough to stargaze. I didn’t know why I was so fascinated with the night sky – it was just instinctive to look up and be in wonder. My love for the stars became so apparent that my grandparents, aunts, and uncles decided to save enough money to buy me a secondhand telescope, a gift that I cherished until I had to move to the United States and leave it behind to my younger relatives.

That telescope opened up a new world for me, one where I only had to look through a pair of simple lens to excitedly meet my nighttime friends face-to-face. While the telescope wasn’t very advanced, it was strong enough to show me the faint outlines of neighboring planets, the tail-ends of occasional comets, and the blurry but beautiful glows of twinkling stars. “There’s stuff out there! STUFF!” I remember saying to my family after my first time looking through the telescope, “there’s a bunch of stuff! So much stuff!”

From there, it was inevitably easy to fall in love with outer space and all of its complications and mysteries. My curiosity and questions about the “stuff” I saw grew in leaps and bounds, propelling me to – in essence – attack our local library to get my hands on anything related to space. I was overjoyed to see an entire shelf dedicated to space science and astronomy. But when I finished devouring the texts there a few weeks later, I was devastated. Surely there was more to read, more to learn more out there?

Can you imagine, then, how I reacted when I was told that my parents and I were moving to America? The America that had sent people to the moon, built incredible spacecrafts and satellites that were currently circling the globe in low orbit, and helped found the International Space Station? I was ecstatic, and my hopes for the future far outweighed my reservations about leaving the only home I had ever known.

If there were any reservations, though, they disappeared the moment I woke up at some point during the 22-hour flight, looked out my tiny plane window, and saw with wide eyes…

… the stars – right there – right in front of me – right within my reach. At eight years old, I genuinely thought the plane was flying in a sea of stars, and kept my face mushed against the glass until a plane attendant asked me to close the window (I did close the window, but I opened it again after she left.)

It’s funny, looking back at that starry-eyed eight-year-old. I want to tell her that there’s only so much more to look forward to. I want to tell her that when she’s ten, she’s going to visit a place called Kennedy Space Center and firmly declare to everyone in the tour group that she will become an astronaut one day. I want to tell her that when she’s thirteen, she’ll visit another place called the Orlando Science Center and peek through an enormous telescope that will show her the distant planet of Saturn in color, and she’ll be so shocked that she’ll ask if the picture was a sticker on the lens. I want to tell her that when she’s eighteen, she’ll gain two mentors who will encourage her to pursue her love for the stars, and help her get started on the path to getting there… I want to tell her that the next eleven years won’t be easy, and there will be times when she’ll feel as if the stars could never be more far away or unreachable.

But I think she’ll end up just fine. She was born with stars in her eyes, after all.

Really interesting to see a space-centric blog that isn't just pretty pictures of stars without any context. Your analyses and explanations of ongoing news aren't bad at all, so keep up the good work.

Thank you so much! I do my best to make sure my entries have good content, so I’m happy to know that you’re enjoying them!

Origins is one of my favorite documentaries of all time. Neil deGrasse Tyson does a marvelous job of narrating a story interwoven with strong scientific evidence, great artistic visuals, and immersive story-telling. While Origins is an old documentary (first shown in 2004), many of its content is still applicable today.

One of my favorite aspects of Origins is its ability to explain to the viewer why understanding the start of our universe is important. Often times, the answer to “How did life start?” is filled with complex scientific concepts and theories. Origins breaks down these complicated explanations into points that anyone can digest. I highly recommend it to any space enthusiast out there.

Meet Our 7 Newest Planetary Neighbors

On Wednesday, February 22, NASA took the whole world by storm when they announced the incredible discovery of 7 Earth-sized exoplanets – all of which could potentially have the right conditions for life to exist!

While there has been a relatively continuous stream of newly found exoplanets in the past years, this exoplanet system, named TRAPPIST-1 for the Chile-based telescope that first discovered the planets back in May, is particularly special because of three main reasons:

1.) They are considered relatively close (40 light years/235 trillion miles) to Earth.

2.) They are the first known system of Earth-sized planets that orbit a single parent star, with 3 planets located in the “Goldilocks zone”, the astrophysical orbit that has just the right conditions for allowing liquid water, and by extension, life, to exist. While all 7 could have liquid water, these 3 have the highest chances.

3.) Their parent star, an ultra-cool dwarf, has temperatures so low that liquid water can exist on the planets closest to it; what’s more, the planets are so incredibly close to their parent star – all 7 are closer to their parent star than Mercury is to our own Sun – that someone standing on the surface of each planet could potentially see the physical features of the other planets.

The implications of this find is mind-blowing: at the moment, Earth is the only planet we know that exists with liquid water in our solar system’s Goldilocks zone. We have no other suitable planet we can use for comparison, which is why the search for life in outer space can seem futile. But this discovery of 7 whole Earth-sized planets with the right conditions for water and life to flourish sparks the age-old question into overdrive – are we alone in the universe or not?

Earth is no longer the potentially only life-sustaining planet; we have 7 exoplanets, 3 in the Goldilocks zone, that can harbor water and life. That just blows my mind, and while I have often lamented in the past that I was born too late for traveling the world and too early for exploring space, I am grateful to be alive in this time of immense space-science discovery.

But what next? We’ve discovered this new system, what are we going to do about it? According to NASA, a new telescope called the James Webb Space Telescope will be launched in 2018. Equipped with state-of-the-art technological capabilities such as increased sensitivity sensors, it will be able to detect chemical signals present in a planet’s atmosphere such as methane, oxygen, and water. And hopefully, it will tell us more about our 7 new neighbors – and what could be on them.