Earlier this week, Saturn gained a whopping 128 new official moons, as the International Astronomical Union recognised discoveries from a team of astronomers led by Edward Ashton at the Academia Sinica in Taiwan. The sixth planet from the Sun now has a grand total of 274 moons, the most of any planet in the Solar System. The discovery has raised a lot of questions. How do you spot moons, and why hadn’t anybody seen these ones already? Doesn’t Jupiter have the most moons? What are they going to call all these moons? Are there more out there? And what exactly…
Author: Laura Nicole Driessen, Postdoctoral researcher in radio astronomy, University of Sydney
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When you wish upon a star, Jiminy Cricket told us, your dreams come true. But according to an idea doing the rounds on social media, that may not be the case: According to astronomy, when you wish upon a star you’re a million years too late. The star is dead, just like your dreams. Is that really true? Did Jiminy Cricket lie to us? As an astronomer, I’m happy to say that the stars we can see in the night sky are a lot closer and live a lot longer than you would think. It’s pretty unlikely you’ve accidentally wished…
With billions of children around the world anxiously waiting for their presents, Father Christmas (or Santa) and his reindeer must be travelling at breakneck speeds to deliver them all in one night. But did you know that light from an object travelling at high speeds changes colour? This is thanks to what’s called the Doppler effect – the way speed affects the length of waves, such as sound or light. When light changes colour due to speed, we call it redshift or blueshift, depending on the direction. If we could catch the colour of Rudolph’s famous red nose with one…
The days are getting longer and in Australia, the switch to daylight saving time is almost upon us (for about 70% of the population, anyway). But why do we have longer days in summer and shorter days in winter? It’s all about the tilt Earth goes around the Sun in an almost circular orbit. But not everything is lined up perfectly. Earth’s axis is tilted by 23.44 degrees relative to its orbit around the Sun. Imagine Earth’s orbit as a flat frisbee with the Sun in the middle and Earth as a ball on a stick going around the edge.…