On Monday, August 21, an estimated 2 million to 7.4 million Americans traveled to see the first total solar eclipse in 99 years to go coast to coast in the United States, which went from Lincoln Beach, Oregon, to Charleston, South Carolina. But, some of them were unlucky, as the weather was overcast in some places. But, luckily for them (and for us), NASA captured some amazing and beautiful images of the eclipse and published them on their website.
On September 1, 2017, a potentially hazardous asteroid named 3122 Florence skimmed past Earth from a mere 4.4 million miles (7 million km) distance. The huge asteroid, which is around 2.7 mile (4.4 km) wide, was the “biggest object passed this close to Earth since the NASA program to detect and track near-Earth asteroids began”, according to Paul Chodas, manager of the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. The close flyby was captured with an amateur astronomer using an 80 mm F5 Apo telescope and a Canon 6D camera, and published on YouTube.
Why do we see only one side of the Moon? You have probably heard references being made to the “dark side” of the Moon – there’s even a Pink Floyd album with that name. But there’s no “dark side” of the moon because our satellite is not illuminated by the Earth, it is illuminated by the Sun. All the surface of the
Ancient symbols carved into stone at Göbekli Tepe (an archaeological site in Turkey) tell the story of a big comet impact more than 13,000 years ago, scientists think. The devastating impact triggered a mini ice age that drove many mammals weighing more than 40 kg to extinction.
According to an article published by New Scientist, carvings made on a pillar known as the “Vulture Stone” in Göbekli Tepe suggest that a swarm of comet fragments hit the Earth in around 11000 BC.
What if we could make a spaceship that is capable of leaving the solar system at the speed of light? How much time would it take to enter interstellar space?
Our Solar system is big, and vast, despite it being really small compared to our galaxy, not to mention the complete universe. To put this into perspective, you can
Have you ever wondered how big is the Earth compared to other planets? Or other stars? Or even the Universe itself?
When it comes to big numbers, very big numbers, the human brain is weak. In fact, our brains cannot deal with really large numbers. That’s why when the subject is Earth, planets, Solar System, galaxies, and in general, the Universe, we cannot truly conceptualize the things. A lot of people think we’re “conquering” space (we are far, far away from that – and maybe we never will), or the “aliens” are regularly visiting Earth as if it is just an hour’s drive from there.
In fact, these people don’t truly understand what are they talking about, how big is the universe, how far even the nearest stars are, and how the Earth is a tiny, tiny spot in a vast space we are still striving to understand.
A beautiful video, once again, from Michael Stevens, titled “How Earth Moves”. Michael explains many concepts, including “sub-solar point”, “sidereal day vs solar day”, or “how Earth moves in space” etc, and he is doing it in a very simplified manner. Enjoy!
What if Mars still had liquid water on its surface and a thick atmosphere filled with clouds, like Earth? How would it look like? Software engineer Kevin Gill of JPL (NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory) wondered this and prepared an image using data from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO, see notes 1) and Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA, see notes 2). The result is stunning!
Gill picked an arbitrary sea level and used GIMP (a free and open-source raster graphics editor used for image retouching and editing) to paint the features onto the satellite images using these measurements.
Elon Musk, the founder, CEO, and Lead Designer of the private space travel company SpaceX announced that “they are planning to get humans to Mars in six years”. In order to achieve this goal, Musk revealed the Interplanetary Transport System, which aims to reach Mars with a human crew for the first time in history.
Previously I posted two articles titled “If The Moon Were Only 1 Pixel – A Tediously Accurate Map Of The Solar System“, and “A Scale Model of Solar System Drawn in the Desert and the Result is Stunning“. In these posts, science enthusiasts have shown the scale of the solar system realistically. Since the human brain cannot deal with really large numbers, these articles provide an amazing way to understand how big actually our Solar System is.
Now, I decided to put the Solar System into scale as an infographic. You can see the scale of the Solar System below, the planets’ distances from the Sun, and the first flybys over them. Plus some statistics about the planets and our home planet, the Earth. Planet sizes are not scaled since they’d be too small to be seen at this scale.