Matthew Cimone, Author at Universe Today

September 1, 2020September 1, 2020 by Matthew Cimone

The Solar System has been Flying Through the Debris of a Supernova for 33,000 Years

Hubble Space Telescope image of supernova 1994D in galaxy NGC 4526.

An Ancient Voyage

Earth is on a journey…

While our planet orbits the Sun each year – a billion kilometers – our entire Solar System is drifting through the Milky Way Galaxy making one rotation every 225-250 million years (that means dinosaurs actually lived on the other side of the Galaxy!) Humanity has been on Earth for a small fraction of that journey, but parts of what we’ve missed is chronicled. It is written into the rock and life of our planet by the explosions of dying stars – supernova. Turns out supernovas write in radioactive ink called Iron-60.

The Crab Nebula is the remains of a Supernova which occurred about a thousand years ago and was visible on Earth recorded by ancient astronomers – C. NASA/ESA/Hubble

As the Sun travels through the Galaxy, so too do the hundreds of billions of other stars that comprise the Milky Way; all swirling and spiraling in varying directions. If you could time travel to a distant past, you’d look up and see an unfamiliar sky – different stars, different constellations, and sometimes the glow of a brilliant supernova. Stars explode in the Milky Way about once every fifty years. Given the immense size of the Galaxy at around 150,000 light years in diameter, the odds of one of those stars exploding in our backyard is low. But while supernova happen in the Galaxy twice a century, those in close proximity to Earth, within 400 light years, do happen once every few million years. And along Earth’s epic 4.5 billion-year journey, it appears that we’ve had close encounters with supernova several times. In fact, we seem to be travelling through the fallout cloud of supernovae right now.

August 26, 2020August 26, 2020 by Matthew Cimone

There’s No Chemical Difference Between Stars With or Without Planets

Orion Nebula - Closest Star Forming Region to Earth c Cimone - Trottier Observatory

Strange New Worlds

Imagine if a star could tell you it had planets. That would be really helpful because finding planets orbiting distant stars – exoplanets – is hard. We found Neptune, the most distant planet in our own solar system, in 1846. But we didn’t have direct evidence of a planet around ANOTHER star until….1995.…149 years later. Think about that. Any science fiction you watched or read that was written before 1995 which depicted travel to exoplanets assumed that other planets even existed. Star Trek: The Next Generation aired its last season in 1994. We didn’t even know if Vulcan was out there. (Now we do!…sortof)

Jupiter (right bright point) and Saturn (left bright point) seen here against the Milky Way were the most distant planets we could see before inventing telescopes – C. Matthew Cimone

August 16, 2020August 18, 2020 by Matthew Cimone

Perseverance and the Quest to Find Life on Mars

Perseverance Rover before being sent to Mars

I remember the Summer of 1997 when a shoebox-sized Mars rover literally broke the Internet.

Sojourner – the first rover we sent to another planet – had just landed on Mars in a giant space airbag bouncing along the surface to a safe stop. The Internet was new. And I was a young space enthusiast with a dial-up modem. For the first time, images from a space exploration mission were beamed to an audience that was connected online. Now we use the term “broke the Internet” as a hyperbolic phrase for various Internet phenomena, but interest in the Mars mission in 97 drove so many hits to NASA mirror servers around the world that global web traffic was disrupted. Patiently I watched as, line by line, orange sky to red stone, the first image posted by NASA loaded on my screen…it took about an hour. Each line resolved was like my own exploration of the planet. And finally, the landing site, in “real time”, was revealed to me and the entire world all at once. What would we discover together?

One of the first images of Sojourner from the 97 Mars Pathfinder Landing – NASA/JPL

July 27, 2020July 27, 2020 by Matthew Cimone

Take a Flight Through the Most Detailed 3D Map of the Universe Ever Made

The most detailed map of the universe ever made

Once I accidentally took a photo of one of the most important stars in the Universe…

Andromeda Galaxy imaged at the SFU Trotter Observatory processed by Matthew Cimone

That star highlighted in the photo is called M31_V1 and resides in the Andromeda Galaxy. The Andromeda – AKA M31- is the closest galaxy to our own Milky Way. But before it was known as a galaxy, it was called the Andromeda Nebula. Before this particular star in Andromeda was studied by Edwin Hubble, namesake of the Hubble Space Telescope, we didn’t actually know if other galaxies even existed. Think about that! As recently as a hundred years ago, we thought the Milky Way might be the ENTIRE Universe. Even then…that’s pretty big. The Milky Way is on the order of 150,000 light years across. A light year is about 10 TRILLION kilometers so even at the speed of light it would take nearly the same length of time to cross the Milky Way as humans have existed on planet Earth. M31_V1 changed all that.

July 14, 2020July 14, 2020 by Matthew Cimone

Time-Lapse Video Reveals 10 Years of the Sun’s Life Crushed into One Stellar Hour

I forget the Sun is a star.

I think we all do sometimes. It’s easy to take for granted. The Sun is that glowing thing that rises in the morning and sets in the evening that we don’t generally pay attention to as we go about our day. However, there are these rare moments when we’re reminded that the Sun is truly a STAR – a titanic living sphere of hydrogen smashing plasma a million times the volume of Earth. One of those rare moments for me was standing in the shadow of the 2017 solar eclipse. We had driven down from Vancouver to Madras, Oregon to watch this astronomical freak of nature. A moon hundreds of times smaller than the Sun, but hundreds of times closer, covers the face of the Sun for the majesty of a STAR to be revealed; the fiery maelstrom of the Sun’s atmosphere visible to the naked eye.