Allen is an amateur astronomer, an IT professional, a podcaster, a father of five growing kids, a barely competent chess player, and the owner and publisher of the Urban Astronomer podcast and website. He has formerly served as Director of the Astrophotography and Citizen Science sections of the Astronomical Society of South Africa. You can find his personal social media feed on Mastodon!
Far away, in the outer reaches of the Solar System lies the dwarf planet Makemake. Discovered in March 2005, it is about two thirds the diameter of the more famous dwarf planet Pluto. Like all dwarf planets, it is so far away and so small that we know very little about it. Astronomers have had to make a number of assumptions, one of which is that all these objects are similar in composition. It’s a reasonable thing to because those … Continue reading →
NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray space telescope, which discovered mysterious Terrestrial Gamma-Ray Flashes about a year ago, has discovered beams of anti-matter arcing through the Earth’s atmosphere. The anti-matter particles are created high above ordinary storm clouds by bolts of lightning. Recent studies of lightning, using high-speed cameras, have revealed a whole world of activity in the upper atmosphere that nobody ever suspected. Phenomena such as Blue Jets, Elves and Sprites are all associated with lightning and dance in the upper atmosphere … Continue reading →
Antimatter is just like normal matter, except that the particles that make it up are the opposite versions of the particles which make up regular matter. As you should know, everything physical in the universe is made up of atoms, and those atoms are made of protons, neutrons and electrons. These particles have a number of properties (mass, spin, etc) including charge. An electron has negative charge, and the amount of charge is exactly the same for every electron in … Continue reading →
Recent studies of lightning, using high-speed cameras, have revealed a whole world of activity in the upper atmosphere that nobody ever suspected. Phenomena such as Blue Jets, Elves and Sprites are all associated with lightning and dance in the upper atmosphere above thunderstorms to altitudes as high as a hundred kilometers! Now, an orbiting observatory built to observe GRB’s (Gamma-ray Bursts — some of the most intensely powerful explosions in the universe which blast out radiation at X Ray and … Continue reading →
Several years ago, NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray space telescope discovered Terrestrial Gamma-Ray Flashes (TGF’s), mysterious burst of high-energy gamma radiation emanating from the Earth’s upper atmosphere. Later observations by Fermi revealed that the TGF’s are caused by streams of anti-matter annihilating atoms of regular matter in the upper atmosphere, and that these anti-matter particles are created high above ordinary storm clouds by bolts of lightning. Fermi is a space telescope, similar to Hubble, but can only see in the gamma … Continue reading →
