recent posts
- Hello, World!
- At Play in the Classroom for Thirty-Five Years: Recollections and Recommendations for Keeping Our Spirits—and Our Students—Soaring
- Reaching every student in your General Education class
- Classroom Stories: Teaching Astronomy to Primarily Non-science Students in Group-setting Activities, by Sandi Brenner (Bryant University)
- JWST Carina Nebula
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Category: Current Events
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By Stacy Palen Astronomers have long been on the hunt for “intermediate-mass” black holes. These are black holes with masses between a few hundred and a few ten-thousands of solar masses. It was thought that these should exist in globular clusters. While looking for these, astronomers have instead found a swarm of smaller black holes,…
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By Stacy Palen Gaia’s latest data haul, from December 2020, includes the proper motions of more than 1 billion stars. So the Gaia astronomers did the fun thing and mapped their future positions as they move against the background of the Milky Way. Below are some questions to ask your students based on this article.…
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By Stacy Palen In 2019, astronomers released the first image of the shadow of a black hole’s event horizon. Further processing of earlier data shows that the accretion disk has rotated. Below are some questions to ask your students based on this article. 1). What is the black circle in the middle of the image?…
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By Stacy Palen Heads up, everyone! NASA is making another extraordinary rover landing on Mars. Mars is an easy target for students to view this month and is easily visible between sunset and midnight. It’s the only bright planet visible just now and is typically easy for students to identify because of its distinctive red…
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By Adam Johnston This week, we have a guest post from a colleague at Weber State University. In addition to teaching at Weber State, Adam Johnston is also the author of the blog First Drafts in which he writes about education, science, and personal experiences. In the post below, Adam discusses the shift in our methods of…
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By Stacy Palen According to this article published by the European Space Agency, the extremely precise mapping being done by the Gaia satellite shows that the warp in the Milky Way Galaxy is moving far faster than expected. This implies that it is caused by interactions with another galaxy rather than by magnetic fields or…
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By Stacy Palen According to this article on The Guardian, when the New Horizons spacecraft arrived at Arrokoth, it revealed a surprising world. Now, planetary scientists are beginning to reconsider their conclusions about the formation of the Solar System. This new discovery appears to favor a gentler model of planet formation than the hierarchical model.…
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By Stacy Palen I recently stumbled upon this article from The Washington Post about stardust on Earth. Mineral dust in the Murchison meteorite shows traces of neon produced by cosmic rays as the dust traveled through space. The abundance of neon atoms indicates that the dust was formed 7 billion years ago—before the Sun formed.…
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By Stacy Palen A new composite image released by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory superimposes radio data on a visual image of a galaxy. Magnetic fields here are shown in blue and green, indicating alternate directions. Here are some questions that you can ask your students based on this image: 1) What is the Hubble…
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Credit: NASA/SDO By Stacy Palen Just in time for the close of the semester, we get a present from NASA! According to this article on NPR, the Parker Solar Probe has arrived at the Sun, and it’s sending us back some big surprises. Here are some questions, inspired by the Parker Solar Probe’s recent…
Teaching Astronomy by Doing Astronomy 