Tag: accurate

Science > Written History > Fortune Telling

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One of the reasons I love science is that it actually does allow us to look into the past and future, beyond our existence in the present.  Written history gives us a perspective of a person who was around before any human currently living on Earth, and allows us to piece together the history of our culture.  This is very important, so no disrespect to historians and their work.  Much disrespect to fortune telling though.  It’s a waste of energy involving a person who fishes for information for a living.  But let’s talk about Science. Since we just passed Canada...

Powerful New Method for Distances

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Ask an astronomer what the hardest thing to do is in astronomy, and chances are they will say ‘measuring distance accurately.’  It is surprisingly difficult to take the light from stars we see and match them to a correct distance.  In the past we have used several different methods depending on how close a star is to us.  For the nearest stars we use parallax, which looks at the change in a star’s position as the Earth is on opposite sides of it’s orbit. All other methods rely on what we call the standard candle approach.  Let’s say you had...