The Earth's atmosphere Take a quick breath. There, that’s what we’re going to talk about today – the atmosphere. And not just the Earth’s familiar atmosphere, but the strange, exotic and deadly atmospheres we find in the Solar System and surrounding extrasolar planets. ...

Spiral galaxy M74. Image credit: Hubble Astronomy is one of the scientific fields that have been completely shaken up by new media. The Internet has enabled communication between researchers in a dramatic new way, creating new collaborations, removing obstacles, and drawing in an army of enthusiastic...

Publish science and win a nobel prize. It's easy and fun! For those non-scientists trying to get their original ideas accepted by the scientific community, you’ve got to have thick skin. It might seem like there’s a vast conspiracy, or a general attitude that drives away original, but...

Globular cluster NGC 362 Have you ever wondered how astronomers do their research? How do they go from idea or question, to gathering their data, to publishing the research. What are all the hoops they have to jump through, the paperwork to fill out, and the cool toys they get to use along the way? ...

Evolution of the large scale structure of the Universe. Image credit: NASA This week we’re going to think big. Bigger than big. We’re going to consider the biggest things in the Universe. If you could pull way back, and examine regions of space billions of light-years across, what would you see? How is...

Artist impression of a gamma ray burst. Image credit: NASA And now we reach the end of our tour through the electromagnetic spectrum. Last stop… gamma rays. These are the most energetic photons in the Universe, boosted up to incredible energies in the most violent places in the Universe. Gamma rays are...

We continue our journey through the electromagnetic spectrum with X-rays. If you’ve ever broken a bone, you probably know how X-rays are most commonly used. While doctors use X-rays to study the human body, and astronomers use X-rays to study some of the hottest places in the Universe. So let’s...

M81 in ultraviolet. Image credit: NASA Our next visit in this tour through the electromagnetic spectrum is the ultraviolet. You can’t see it, but anyone who’s spent a day out in the hot sun without sunblock has sure experienced its effects. Ultraviolet radiation is associated with the birth of...

Hubble Space Telescope Optical astronomy; now this is the kind of astronomy a human being was born to do. In fact, until the last century, this was the only kind of astronomy anybody ever did. Now we’ve got the whole electromagnetic spectrum to explore, but our heart still belongs to optical astronomy....

James Webb telescope Today we continue our unofficial tour through the electromagnetic spectrum, stopping at the infrared spectrum – you feel it as heat. This section of the spectrum gives us our only clear view through dusty material to see newly forming planetary systems and shrouded supermassive...