This… is… amazing! Astrophotographer Martin Junius recorded this stunning video of the total solar eclipse on March 20, 2015, during the E-Flight AB 1000. In the video, you can see the shadow of the moon moving across the clouds below. The plane was 35,000 feet (10,600 meters) above the Northern Atlantic / Norwegian Sea when the video was recorded.
The Moon is the Earth’s only natural satellite. It is also the fifth-largest natural satellite in the Solar System and the largest among planetary satellites relative to the size of the planet that it orbits. It formed about 4.51 billion years ago from the debris left over after a giant impact between Earth and a Mars-sized body called Theia (this is known as the Giant Impact Hypothesis and is the most widely accepted explanation of the formation of the Moon). This impact happened not long after the Earth has been formed. But, what if that giant impact never happened? What would the Earth without Moon be like?
When a meteoroid hits Earth, it’s not because the space rock has “fallen out of” its orbit. It’s because its orbit crosses over Earth’s orbit at the exact right (or wrong) moment.
As of 2019, only five space probes are leaving the solar system: Pioneer 10, Pioneer 11, Voyager 1, Voyager 2, and New Horizons. The Voyagers already left the solar system and entered interstellar space (Voyager 1 on August 25, 2012, and Voyager 2 on November 5, 2018. The others also will leave the heliosphere (see notes 1) and reach interstellar space in a few years.
All of these spacecraft were launched by NASA.
The speed of light is the Universal speed limit – nothing can travel faster than light. In the vacuum (commonly denoted c), its exact value is 299,792,458 meters per second (around 186,000 miles per second). In other words, if you could travel at the speed of light, you could go around the Earth 7.5 times in one second.
Launched by NASA on September 5, 1977, to study the outer solar system, the Voyager 1 is the furthest human-made object from Earth. As of October 2022, it is more than 14,749,847,051 miles (23,737,577,852 km) away from our home planet. It is also moving away at a speed of 38,026.77 mph (61,198.15 km/h) relative to the Sun.
Despite that huge distance (even the light covers that distance in almost 22 hours!), thanks to NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN), we can still communicate with it (also with its sister, Voyager 2). But how far can Voyager 1 go before we lose communication?
We only see one side of the moon, because it is tidally locked to the planet Earth (tidal locking the situation when an object’s orbital period matches its rotational period). What if the Earth was tidally locked to the Sun?
A beautiful 486958 Arrokoth image (initially nicknamed Ultima Thule) taken by the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) aboard NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft in original context against a starry background (i.e., not zoomed in).
NASA Goddard Planetary Scientist James O’ Donoghue created a nice animation showing the sidereal days and axial tilts of the solar system planets.
Researchers discovered the farthest known object in our solar system and named it “Farout” (far-out-there). It is about 120 times farther than Earth is from the Sun (120 AU, see notes 1). For comparison, the most distant planet, Neptune is about 30 AU from the Sun. At its most distant, once upon a time the ninth planet, now a dwarf planet, Pluto, can be 49 AU (7.29 billion km, or 4.53 billion miles) from the Sun. Currently, Pluto is at about 34 AU, making Farout more than three-and-a-half times more distant than the Solar System‘s most-famous dwarf planet.