Dan Majaess
About Dan Majaess
Dan Majaess is a Canadian astronomer based in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He researches the cosmic distance scale, variable stars, star clusters, and terrestrial mass extinctions linked to asteroid/comet impacts.
Here are my most recent posts
June 10, 2013
Want to stay on top of all the space news? Follow @universetoday on Twitter M31 and M33 are two of the nearest spiral galaxies, and can form the basis for determining distances to more remote spiral galaxies and constraining the expansion rate of the Universe (the Hubble constant). Hence the relevance and importance of several new studies [...]
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April 25, 2013
Obtaining an accurate distance between the Sun and the center of our Galaxy remains one of the principal challenges facing astronomers. The ongoing lively debate concerning this distance hinges partly on the nature of dust found along that sight-line. Specifically, are dust particles lying toward the Galactic center different from their counterparts near the Sun? [...]
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April 18, 2013
Textbooks often cite that planetary nebulae (PNe, plural) represent an endstate for lower-mass single stars. But conversely, recent research suggests that most PNe stem from binary systems. The lowest mass star theorized to form the typical PN is near 1 solar mass, and thus without a companion the Sun may not surpass the mass limit [...]
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April 4, 2013
“No scientific discovery is named after its discoverer,” - Stigler/Merton. Edwin Hubble’s contributions to astronomy earned him the honor of having his name bestowed upon arguably the most famous space telescope (the Hubble Space Telescope, HST). Contributions that are often attributed to him include the discovery of the extragalactic scale (there exist countless other galaxies beyond [...]
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March 16, 2013
Observations by the Kepler satellite have advanced our knowledge of stars and their orbiting planets, yielding more than 100 confirmed planets and about 3,000 candidates. However, orbiting planets may not be the source for a fraction of those detections. “There are many things in the sky that can produce transit-like signals that are not planets, and [...]
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