Leonid Meteor Shower

When I was a kid, we used to spend two weeks in the summer camping at a nearby reservoir. My brother and I often slept in the ski boat that was anchored out. We entertained ourselves by counting meteors as they flashed by in the dark sky. 

I credit those exciting observations with my subsequent interest in science and eventual work at NASA-Johnson Space Center. So cool.

Tonight, the Slooh Community Observatory, an astronomy broadcast service, will host a live webcast (Nov. 16) showing live views of the Leonid meteor shower. 

The livestream will host live meteor feeds from the observatory at the Institute of Astrophysics in the Canary Islands, as well as live streams from the United Kingdom, and Slooh’s HQ in Connecticut. Go science!

Leonid Meteor Shower

When I was a kid, we used to spend two weeks in the summer camping at a nearby reservoir. My brother and I often slept in the ski boat that was anchored out. We often entertained ourselves by counting meteors as they flashed by in the dark sky. 

I credit those exciting observations with my subsequent interest in science and eventual work at NASA-Johnson Space Center. So cool.

Tonight, the Slooh Community Observatory, an astronomy broadcast service, will host a live webcast (Nov. 16) showing live views of the Leonid meteor shower. 

The livestream will host live meteor feeds from the observatory at the Institute of Astrophysics in the Canary Islands, as well as live streams from the United Kingdom, and Slooh’s HQ in Connecticut. Go science!

Super Massive Black Holes Explained (so anyone can understand)

 Most of you know how much I love all things space. Combine that with the brilliant cartoon artwork of Jorge Cham, several astrophysicists talking about their work, and my day is made! 

When it comes to astrophysics and phenomenon like black holes, most of us think we have the topic covered. After all, the television and film industry has devoted a huge amount of reel space to presenting dangerous scenarios concerning black holes and their ilk.

It turns out there is a lot of straight forward science that is not well understood like black holes don't actually suck material in. (The word "hole" probably threw the scriptwriters off.)

Anyway, check out the video or read the explanation at PhD Comics. Both make it easy to explain to friends at a bar, baseball game, or during speed dating. Go science!

CIBER Spots Outcast Stars

Data from the Cosmic Infrared Background Experiment, or CIBER, provided support that background infrared light in the universe (seen by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope), comes from distant stars ejected from parent galaxies. 

"We think stars are being scattered out into space during galaxy collisions," said Michael Zemcov, Ph.D., experimental astrophysicist at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.

Using smaller suborbital NASA rockets, CIBER spotted two cosmic infrared (IR) wavelengths shorter than those measured by Spitzer. The light appears to come from a previously undetected population of stars between galaxies and CIBER measurements suggest the IR glow between distant galaxies is caused by orphan stars.

To test whether stray stars have been spun off from parent galaxies, future CIBER experiments will check to see if the stars are still located in roughly the same neighborhood. Go science!