Thomas Moynihan, University of Oxford
It is 1950 and a group of scientists are walking to lunch against the majestic backdrop of the Rocky Mountains. They are about to have a conversation that will become a scientific legend. The scientists are at the Los Alamos Ranch School, the site for the Manhattan Project, where each of the group has lately played their part in ushering in the atomic age.
Continue reading The end of the world: a history of how a silent cosmos led humans to fear the worstIf you read Isaac Asimov’s 1986 novel “Foundation and Earth”, you’ll remember how the main characters of the book (Councilman Golan Trevize, historian Janov Pelorat, and Gaian Bliss) were amazed by Saturn’s rings. They were thinking the gas giant with preeminent rings in old stories was just a myth. But after seeing Saturn, they made sure that they found the solar system which contains the Earth, the original home of humanity.
Continue reading Saturn on steroids: J1407bFew topics in science command as much attention as the discovery of extrasolar planets – those as-yet-unseen worlds, light years beyond our own Sun. In the quest to learn whether we are alone in the cosmos, astronomers are teasing out subtle wobbles and periodic dimmings of distant stars: telltale signs that a planet, much too faint to see directly in telescopes, is nevertheless present.
Continue reading In space, there really might be no place like homeWe can turn Earth into a giant telescope. According to a recent study titled “The ‘Terrascope’: On the Possibility of Using the Earth as an Atmospheric Lens”, published by David Kipping of Columbia University, our planet offers an opportunity for pronounced lensing.
Continue reading Terrascope: Turning Earth into a giant telescopeTo see exactly where the spacecraft and the celestial bodies (planets and other astronomical objects) really are, right now, you can use NASA’s real-time, 3D solar system model.
Continue reading Where are the spacecraft and planets now? An amazing NASA animationEven as late as 1991, we had no hard evidence of planets existing outside our solar system, known as “exoplanets”. Today, over 4000 exoplanets are known to exist. NASA has published an amazing video-map showing them in the Milky Way galaxy on the Astronomy Picture of the Day website.
Continue reading NASA has published the map of 4,000 exoplanetsNow we’re living on a warm, hospitable planet. As Carl Sagan has said “That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.” We, humans, are the unquestionable rulers of our little oasis in a hostile universe. But all things must pass. The life on Earth, even the planet itself, won’t last forever. What’s more, the humans may go extinct before our planet (and probably before the life on it) dies out. Here some possible (and horrible) ways how planet Earth (or, at least, life on Earth) could die.
Continue reading How Earth Could Die – 9 Horrible WaysThis amazing photo of the 2019 Solar Eclipse from the Moon’s orbit was taken on July 2, 2019, by the Chinese lunar satellite DSLWP-B (Longjiang-2).
Continue reading This is how a solar eclipse seen from the MoonHubble Space Telescope was launched on April 24, 1990, and entered service on May 20, 1990. Since then, it has observed all the planets in our Solar System, apart from Earth and Mercury. Earth is far better studied by geologists on the ground and specialized probes in orbit. Hubble can’t observe Mercury as it is too close to the Sun, whose brightness would damage the telescope’s sensitive instruments.
Here are the best images of the planets (except Earth and Mercury) and some non-planets of our Solar System through the eye of Hubble Space Telescope.
Continue reading Solar System through the eyes of Hubble Space TelescopeJupiter’s moon Ganymede is the largest and most massive of the Solar System’s moons. It has a mean radius of 2634.1±0.3 km (about 1636 miles, 0.413 Earths). For comparison, our Moon’s radius is 1,737.1 km (1079 mi). What if Ganymede was the Earth’s second moon? How would it look in the sky, if it was at the same distance as the Moon?
Continue reading What if Ganymede was the Earth’s second moon?
