A video released a couple of days ago is a brilliant short film about a group of friends who went in to the Nevada desert and built a scale model of the solar system to give us a perspective on how large space actually is. Filmmakers Alex Gorosh and Wylie Overstreet led the project, which featured footage of the production of the model as well as some interesting results. Watch right to the end, where some fabulous footage of the Apollo program is shown, along with some inspiring words from the few men who have seen the Earth from beyond...
Around 470 Million years ago, two asteroids collided in the asteroid belt between the planets Mars and Jupiter. This sent fragments everywhere, and millions of years later these fragments moved into the inner solar system, many of which struck the Earth as meteorites. Recently, in Jämtland county, Sweden, a team of geophysicists has identified a pair of impact craters that were formed at the same time, likely from two separate impactors. One of the craters is a massive 7.5 Km across, while the other is smaller at 700 meters. This is the first time a double impactor has been scientifically confirmed on Earth....
It sounds more wacky over-the-top science fiction, but this is real. A video from the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) shows a huge spiralling solar prominence many times larger than the Earth. The Sun’s powerful magnetic fields drive such events, and even though I’m well aware crazy things like this happen on the Sun every day, I’m still blown away. Cheesy disaster B-movie? Let’s call it Solar Plasma Tornado.
Lovely Earth is not entirely lonely. We have five planets that have been observed since the dawn of civilization. The five are visible with the naked eye in the sky at different times of year, and were given the name planets as a derivation of the Greek ‘planetes,’ meaning ‘wanderers.’ They do wander, or at least they appear to move against the background of the stars, since they are much closer to the Earth as it orbits the Sun. So what planets are visible this month? For September 2015 and back to school, you had better be willing to get...
Categorizing objects in the universe can be difficult. The fiasco with Pluto over the last decade is more than proof of that. We generally look to location and then to size as the two main methods for classifying the stuff that permeates the cosmos. Galaxies contain stars, which host orbiting planets, which host orbiting moons; While asteroids fly in between planets and icy comets are wander through the outskirts of star systems. But what about the in-between objects? Often we find strange things in strange places. There are moons in our solar system that are larger than planets. What would...
In the last few days, we have watched the intricate dance of Venus and Jupiter in the Western sky after sunset. They have tangoed and passed by one another and the world has watched as the best conjunction of the year has come and gone. Don’t forget that even though they appear close in the sky, Venus is actually closer to the Earth than it is to Jupiter. Jupiter is hundreds of millions of kilometers further away than Venus. Today’s APOD is a beautiful shot by Letian Wang combining the proximity of the two planets with the (much further East...
For the last few months, Venus and Jupiter have been visible in the night sky. Venus makes it’s usual 584 day cycle, becoming an ‘evening star’ once again, reaching far from the Sun in the West, while still following our central star. Jupiter has slowly worked its way westward over the past few months, due more in part to Earth’s orbit than Jupiter’s. Finally, the long-awaited conjunction of the planets is nigh, and it offers the best views and photographic opportunities of the year for professional and amateur astronomers alike. What is the brightest object in the sky? The Sun...
The true story of why Pluto isn’t a planet goes back further than you would think. It has a lot to do with our understanding of science at the time, and a lot more to do with surprising luck. I made this video a couple of days ago for the Khan Academy Talent Search. I hope you enjoy it. It will be interesting as we move into better telescope technologies that allow us to see further into the depths of the solar system and the universe. What strange mysteries will we find?
What is the brightest object in the sky? Why the Sun of course. Second brightest? The Moon. Most people are able to answer this question quite easily, but what is the third brightest? The fourth? Many people will confidently say Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, or Polaris the north star. The answer is that the planet Venus is third and the planet Jupiter is fourth. It shouldn’t be that surprising that planets hold these positions. They are much closer than the distant background of stars, and the human species has been observing them since the dawn of recorded...
Auroras on Earth are caused by the ionization of atoms high in the atmosphere near the north and south magnetic poles. The solar wind flies toward the Earth and this harmful radiation is blocked and funnelled by our magnetic field, creating harmless, beautiful glows that remind us how close we came to total destruction, but were saved by our planet. Do other planets have auroras? Certainly! Jupiter and Saturn do, and even moons like Ganymede can have auroral activity. It really depends on the magnetic field. So how does a planet like Mars, with no magnetic field, have auroras? This...
