As I often do, I pulled up the Astronomy Picture of the Day, and noticed today’s photo was a fond reminder of the eclipse I witnessed a month ago. I began to think about the preparation and timing, planning and organizing, the countless hours of testing gear for a single moment lasting two minutes, where the Moon and Sun aligned. I was in the right place, at the right time. Solar Eclipses are rare, and it’s mostly because only a narrow band of land on Earth, usually around 100 Km wide, experiences such an event at any one time. And with...
If a supernova were to go off somewhere in our galaxy, the minimum safe distance for Earthbound life would be about 50 light years. Any closer than that, and we would experience an intense blast of high energy radiation and an eventual shower of radioactive particles. It would be like nuclear bombs were set off all around the Earth, causing little destruction but a lot of radioactive fallout. Supernovae are incredibly powerful to be able to cause such damage at 50 light years, but even at larger distances, we can see evidence of their effects here on Earth. A team of...
One of the most important science goals of the Rosetta mission is to determine the conditions in the early solar system, as well as the element abundance and climate that led to the development of life on Earth. By studying a comet that has been isolated in Space for 4.5 Billion years, we can learn about the formation of the Solar System and the origin of the raw materials for life on Earth. The Earth was thought to be so warm when it formed that any water would have evaporated away into space. If so, where did our vast oceans come...
