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GAM 2018 Blog
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Our Moon: a Silvery Hallmark of Global Influence and Significance
By Quentin Parker Under the auspices of Astronomers Without Borders, this year's Global Astronomy Month focuses on our nearest terrestrial body, our own moon. The moon causes our ocean's tides, affects life in amazing ways from the timing of massive coral spawning in Australia's great barrier reef, to higher biological rhythms in animals and to theories that life itself arose on Earth because of the effect of the moon. We always see the same face because it rotates once on its axis at the same time it takes to orbit the earth, 27.2322 days. It is new and old, waxing...
Chasing the Lights
By Alan Dyer Aurora tourists take in a show in Norway from deck of the ms Nordnorge in March 2018, on one of the aurora cruises offered by the Hurtigruten ferry and cruise line. Few sky sights inspire us as does the aurora. The northern hemisphere version, the aurora borealis, is the most accessible, sparking a popular trade in aurora tourism. Even those with little interest in stargazing place seeing the Northern Lights high on their life-long “bucket list” of experiences. I'm fortunate to live in western Canada, where the zone in which auroras are seen most often – the...
Moon in Your Classroom
By Thilina Heenatigala Students role playing to show Lunar phase. Credit: IAU astroEDU The Moon is the Earth's only natural satellite and the fifth largest moon in the Solar System. It was formed 4.6 billion years ago. The Moon is in synchronous rotation with Earth meaning the same side is always facing the Earth. As a celestial object that's very close to us and integrated in daily lives, our Moon plays a big role. It's important to understand the behaviour and nature of the Moon. In order to provide high-quality classroom educational activities, IAU's astroEDU project has curated a ‘Collection'...
The Many Ways We Find Water on the Moon
By Joshua Bandfield In the past decade, there have been a lot of water-on-the-Moon discoveries reported in scientific journals and making their way into the popular news. With new and highly capable spacecraft missions, we have been seeing the Moon in a new light (literally! – given the expansive wavelength coverage of the spacecraft measurements). We are also revisiting samples returned from the Apollo and Luna missions using extraordinarily detailed lab measurements to glean new insights about the Moon. What's remarkable is that as we approach the half-century mark after Apollo, we are still making fundamental discoveries about the Moon,...
Discovering the Elementary Connection Between Stars and Us
By Megan Watzke, Kimberly Arcand, and Peter Edmonds Where do most of the elements essential for life on Earth come from? The answer: inside the furnaces of stars and the explosions that mark the end of some stars' lives. Astronomers have long studied exploded stars and their remains — known as "supernova remnants" — to better understand exactly how stars produce and then disseminate many of the elements observed on Earth, and in the cosmos at large. Due to its unique evolutionary status, Cassiopeia A (Cas A) is one of the most intensely studied of these supernova remnants. A recent...
