Around 66 million years ago, an asteroid (or a comet) with a diameter of at least 10 kilometers (6 miles) impacted a few miles from the present-day town of Chicxulub in Mexico at around 64,000 kilometers per hour (40,000 mph). The impact triggered a chain of events what is known today as the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) extinction event, also known as the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) extinction, and wiped out three-quarters of the plant and animal species on Earth, including non-avian dinosaurs
The Sun is the primary source of energy for Earth’s climate system, and life on Earth. With a diameter of about 1.39 million kilometers (864,337 miles, i.e. 109 times that of Earth), and a mass of about 1.9885×1030 kg (330,000 times that of Earth, accounting for about 99.86% of the total mass of the Solar System), it may be the biggest thing in this neighborhood, but it is actually just a medium-sized star among the hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way galaxy.
In the video published by the CAMENGAT creative astronomy below, you can see some dwarf stars and other giants compared to the Sun at the edge of its sphere: at 150 million kilometers (1 AU, see notes 1) with a 50 mm objective. The stars are the Sun, Alpha Centauri A, Sirius, Vega, Pollux, Arcturus, Aldebaran, Rigel, Antares, and Betelgeuse. The scenario: Astronomical Observatory of Paranal, Chile.
NASA has published an amazing video titled “Sounds of Saturn: Hear Radio Emissions of the Planet and Its Moon Enceladus”. The analysis of the data from the Cassini Spacecraft’s Grand Finale orbits showed a surprisingly powerful interaction of plasma waves moving from Saturn to its icy moon Enceladus. Researchers converted the recording of plasma waves into a “whooshing” audio file that we can hear, in the same
European Space Agency (ESA) has published the complete Rosetta image archive under a Creative Commons license, which means the complete archive is freely available: you can copy, share, and tweak the content.
To put things into a perspective, here are some of the largest moons of our Solar System (including our moon) and their sizes compared to Earth.
The moon illusion: if you go out on a clear night when it’s a full moon, you may notice how gigantic the Earth’s satellite looks when it’s near the horizon. But, in fact, that moon is the exact same size as every other time you’ve ever seen it in the sky. You can test this by holding your thumbnail at arm’s length and comparing it to the size of the Moon when it is near the horizon and high in the sky, and you’ll see it doesn’t change size.
Photographs of the Moon at different elevations also show that its size remains the same. In fact, it plays a trick on your brain which is called the “Moon Illusion”. This illusion has been known since ancient times, and an explanation of this optical phenomenon is still debated.
The moon illusion is subtle for some and dramatic for others (including me). A small fraction of people even don’t see it.
The average distance between the Earth and the Moon is 384,400 km (238,855 miles). It’s a vast number that’s difficult to truly comprehend, leading many people to believe the Moon is much closer to Earth than it actually is. Astronomical distances are often hard to grasp. While planets and stars are massive, the spaces between them are far greater—beyond the reach of our imagination.
Hint: they are all space rocks. But, there are some differences. The biggest difference between an asteroid and a comet, for example, is what they are made of.
Where is the coldest known place in the Universe? It may sound strange, but today, it is here on Earth: in 1995, in a laboratory in M.I.T. (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), the German physicist Wolfgang Ketterle and his colleagues have cooled a sodium gas to the lowest temperature ever recorded, only half-a-billionth of a degree above absolute zero.
But, soon, this record will be broken. NASA is going to launch a facility to the International Space Station (ISS) that will contain a spot 10 billion times colder than outer space. The new Cold Atom Laboratory (CAL) facility, which will operate in microgravity, could help answer some big questions in modern physics, allowing researchers to dive deep into the quantum realm in a way that would never be possible here on Earth.
ESA’s (European Space Agency) Gaia spacecraft has created the most accurate and detailed map of the Milky Way galaxy (and beyond) to date. The map includes high-precision measurements of nearly 1.7 billion stars and reveals previously unseen details of our home Galaxy. It is the second iteration of the map published by ESA on April 25, 2018.