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The first CAC – Aurora Borealis will be administered on Friday, February 3, 2023. Students must register for the competition by filling out a form in bio.

Contest Format
Multiple-choice and short answer questions.

There are two divisions of the CAC:
Junior – for students in Grade 10 and below
Senior – for students in Grade 11 and 12

Participants can only take one of the two versions.

Contest is written through an online test-taking software called testinvite.

Bat-nebula!
What is the most spook-tacular nebula in the galaxy? One contender is LDN 43, which bears an astonishing resemblance to a vast cosmic bat flying amongst the stars on a dark Halloween night. Located about 1400 light years away in the constellation Ophiuchus, this molecular cloud is dense enough to block light not only from background stars, but from wisps of gas lit up by the nearby reflection nebula LBN 7. Far from being a harbinger of death, this 12-light year-long filament of gas and dust is actually a stellar nursery. Glowing with eerie light, the bat is lit up from inside by dense gaseous knots that have just formed young stars.

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NGC 6302, known as the "Butterfly Nebula"

To observe it across a more complete spectrum of light, from near-ultraviolet to near-infrared, helping researchers better understand the mechanics at work in its technicolor "wings" of gas. The observations highlight a new pattern of near-infrared emission from singly ionized iron, which traces an S shape from lower left to upper right. This iron emission likely traces the central star system’s most recent ejections of gas, which are moving at much faster speeds than the previously expelled mass

The star or stars at its center are responsible for the nebula's appearance. In their death throes, they have cast off layers of gas periodically over the past couple thousand years. The "wings" of NGC 6302 are regions of gas heated to more than 36,000 degrees Fahrenheit that are tearing across space at more than 600,000 miles an hour

It is located in the constellation Scorpius

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Starting January 2023, the CAAA will organize a new competition for high school students across Canada called the Canadian Astronomy Competition (CAC) – Aurora Borealis

The objective of this competition is to develop students’ interest and creativity in the astronomy and space exploration

The CAC is held annually with the support of Perimeter Institute

Contest Format
Multiple-choice and short answer questions

There are two versions of the CAC:
Junior – for students in Grade 10 and below
Senior – for students in Grade 11 and 12

Participants can only take one of the two versions

Dear high school students, the submission deadline is tomorrow before midnight

Please make sure you submit your work on time and read the instructions on the website carefully before submitting
www.caao.ca

The contest consists of two divisions. The senior division is open to all students who are in Grade 12 or under. The junior division is open only to students who are 15 (born after January 1, 2007) or younger

Brown dwarfs are intermediate between low mass stars and massive Jovian planets

Their core temperatures and pressures are not high enough to maintain hydrogen fusion because their mass is too low (more than 10 times that of Jupiter but less than 7% the mass of the Sun). They are self-luminous, generating heat from their slow gravitational contraction. The more massive brown dwarfs enjoy a brief period of thermonuclear activity but they quickly exhaust their limited supply of fuel, so they never reach a stable state

As the luminosity of brown dwarfs is very low, they are difficult to find. The first one was discovered in the early 1990s, but now several hundreds have been identified

Have you heard of Planet X?

For nearly a century and a half after the discovery of Uranus by Herschel in 1781, its peculiar motion around the Sun intrigued astronomers. They thought that the puzzling vagaries were due to the gravitational influences of nearby bodies

A detailed analysis of its orbit led “Le Verrier” to discover Neptune in 1846. Even that could not explain all the anomalies of Uranus’s orbit

Later American astronomer Percival Lowell carried out a systematic search for a planet beyond Neptune, calling it “Planet X”. This led to the discovery of Pluto in 1930 by Clyde Tombaugh

Image is taken by new horizons spacecraft from Pluto in 2015

Dear high school students, you are all invited to participate in CAAO 2022

The CAAO is now available to download. Please read the instructions on the website carefully before starting
www.caao.ca

The contest consists of two divisions. The senior division is open to all students who are in Grade 12 or under. The junior division is open only to students who are 15 (born after January 1, 2007) or younger

CAAO 2022

The CAAO will be posted on March 31. Students will have two weeks to complete the exam. The deadline is April 15 at 11:59 PM EST. The CAAO results will be released on April 25

The CAAO usually consists of six theory problems. Students are given a time frame to write their solutions and send them back to the organizer
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The top scorers will be selected for the international training camp and eventually will represent Canada in the IOAA. As of 2022, the CAAO will be separated into a junior and a senior division

As the months change, the direction toward the rising Sun changes

This image shows the direction of sunrise every month during 2021 as seen from the city of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. The camera in the image is facing due east, with north toward the left and south toward the right. The top image was taken in 2020 December, while the bottom image was captured in 2021 December, making 13 images in total. Although the Sun always rises in the east in general, it rises furthest to the south of east on the Winter solstice, and furthest north of east on the Summer solstice. In many countries, the December Solstice is considered an official change in season

Image credit: Luca Vanzella

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Helix Nebula


When a star like the Sun runs out of fuel, it expands and its outer layers puff off, and then the core of the star shrinks. This phase is known as a "planetary nebula," and astronomers expect our Sun will experience this in about 5 billion years


When the hydrogen fuel for the fusion reaction runs out, the star turns to helium for a fuel source, burning it into an even heavier mix of carbon, nitrogen and oxygen. Eventually, the helium will also be exhausted, and the star dies, puffing off its outer gaseous layers and leaving behind the tiny, hot, dense core, called a white dwarf. The lonely white dwarf is seen in the second image

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