Doran Planetarium - Laurentian University

09/01/2026

Imagine the excitement talking about 'Black Hole Stars' and the science behind it in our upcoming planetarium events -- forecasting a black hole series....

The complex puzzle known as little red dots has become more complete since their initial discovery by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope in 2022. Now a particular little red dot’s spectrum is helping connect many of the pieces.

07/30/2026

I have been thinking about a meditation on astronomical numbers under the night sky for a long time, and I think the meditation will work very well with Jason's magic numbers of the smallest subatomic world.

Join the Doran Planetarium - Laurentian University on August 4th at 7PM for a public event titled “Dark Matter and the Magic Numbers of the Universe”. This event is presented by Dr. Jason Holt from TRIUMF and will include and 30-minute showing of the night sky with Dr. Hoi Cheu.

07/27/2026

Life is possible because of the nuclear reaction inside our Sun, which sheds light—literally—on our existence. What if an understanding of the forces inside atomic nuclei could also shed some light on our search for dark matter? Dr. Janson Holt of Canada’s particle accelerator centre TRIUMF is going to shed some light on this idea.

07/12/2026

We had a full house and a wonderful evening at the Doran Planetarium on Friday, July 10, with Dr. Michela Lai. We learned a great deal about dark matter. I was especially touched when a couple said the event was well worth their three hour drive to attend, and a longtime supporter gave me a set of bottle stickers he had collected—an interesting nod to the origin of the name “Doran Planetarium.”

06/30/2026

Dr. Michela Lai (Astrophysicist, Queen’s University) will be the featured speaker for this public talk and planetarium night sky show at Laurentian University’s Doran Planetarium.
In this special event, we will go back in time to the earliest moments of the universe to find the first imprints of dark matter. Spanning cosmic time, we will discuss how dark matter has shaped the galaxy clusters as we observe them today. We will show how scientists build cutting-edge experiments in underground labs, such as SNOLAB, to bring us closer to confirming dark matter's existence by unraveling its basic properties.
Everyone is welcome, and admission is free (brought to you by SNOLAB, Doran Planetarium (Laurentian University), and the Sudbury Centre of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada).

Date and Time: July 10, 7:00 p.m. - 8:30 p.m.
Place: The Doran Planetarium, Laurentian University

05/04/2026

Adam Shoalts, 'the Canadian Indiana Jones', is speaking at the EcoSummit to 300+ public and high school students. Two of the workshops will take place at the planetarium this afternoon. I plan to show the students how we are made of star dust and how the star dust comes into being.

04/27/2026

The sigma standard describes how likely it is that an observed phenomenon is real. A 1-sigma result means there is a 68% chance, 2-sigma at 95%, 3-sigma at 99.7%, 4-sigma at 99.99%. But only a 5-sigma result, corresponding to 99.99994% certainty, is when astrophysicists or astronomers declare a discovery.
Astrophysicists have been burned by seeing 4 sigma results that turn out to be statistical noise, so it has to be 5 sigma or get yourself side-eyed at the next academic conference.
The detection of dimethyl sulfide (DMS), a compound that almost only life can produce, in exoplanet K2-18b by the Webb Telescope is 3 sigma (99.7%). LIGO’s first detection of merging black holes in 2016 was reported at about 5.1 sigma, making it one of the landmark discoveries in astronomy.
5 sigma is roughly 1 in 1.74 million chance of occurring by random noise in a two-tailed test. 5.1 sigma improves this to about 1 in 2.94 million, making false positives ~40% less likely.

04/21/2026

The Lyrid meteor shower peaks today (April 22). It is called the Lyrids because the meteors appear to radiate from the constellation Lyra around midnight. In late spring, Lyra rises in the east during the late evening.

04/07/2026

Many planetarium visitors have seen diagrams of the flight path of Artemis II and wondered why it is such a big deal. To help them visualize the real challenge, I have created this properly scaled diagram of the Earth and the Moon. Between the Earth’s centre and the Moon’s centre we could fit roughly 30 Earths. Or, more dramatically, if I hold a one‑foot‑long model of the Earth at one end of the planetarium, a visitor holding the Moon (a ball about one third the diameter of the Earth model) will have to stand at the opposite end of the 30‑foot‑long planetarium. Now, imagine shooting a small spacecraft towards the little ball so that the spacecraft will sling back by its gravity.

04/06/2026

Photography:
1972, front lighting (the sun is between Apollo and Earth), short exposure, black background, deeper color, seeing no stars and no atmosphere.
2026, back lighting (the sun is behind Earth), long exposure, grey background), colour washout, seeing stars and, most importantly, the fragile, thin layer of Earth's atmosphere.