If you go out on a clear night when it’s 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 as 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 called the “Moon Illusion”. This illusion has been known since the ancient times, and an explanation of this optical phenomenon is still debated.
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Category Archives: Earth Facts
World’s Water Inequality Crisis
Despite today people are living longer, healthier, and happier lives than ever before, there are still many problems that humanity should address. One of the most important of them is the water inequality. While people in First World countries can very easily take fresh, clean water for granted, more than 800 million others in impoverished areas have no access to any clean water source. It is a common occurrence in some regions for people to defecate openly, walk more than 30 minutes to access clean water and share toilets with other humans. In 2018, is this really something that we should just accept as an inevitable way of the world?
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How Far Away Is The Moon?
Yesterday, I stumbled upon a YouTube channel named The Science Asylum. In this channel, physicist Nick Lucid covers some popular science subjects. For example, the video below, titled “How Far Away Is The Moon?” explains the distance between the Earth and the moon, and how our brains aren’t good at dealing with the big numbers.
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What’s the Difference Between a Meteoroid, a Meteor, a Meteorite, an Asteroid, and a Comet?
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.
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TRAPPIST-1e has an Iron Core
A new study published on April 26, 2018, suggests that TRAPPIST-1e, an exoplanet orbiting the red dwarf star TRAPPIST-1, has a large iron core. This could mean that the planet TRAPPIST-1e may have a protective magnetosphereNotes 1 like we have here on Earth.
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What Would Happen If the Earth Started Spinning Backward?
The dynamics of the ocean and the atmosphere are strongly influenced by the Earth’s rotation. Currently, our planet rotates from west to east (prograde, which appears counterclockwise) with a linear velocity of 465.1013 m/s (1674.365 km/h or 1040.40 mph) at the equator. What would happen if the Earth started spinning backward (from east to west)?
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Watch: Earth’s Biosphere – Monthly Averages of Land Greenness (Vegetation) and Ocean Chlorophyll
NASA has published a video titled “Earth’s Biosphere: The Green Marble”, showing the monthly averages of land greenness (vegetation) and ocean chlorophyll. You can watch how the primary producers (plants and phytoplankton) transform the Earth’s landmasses and oceans over 12 months.
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What did Ancient Earth Look Like
I stumbled upon an amazing web page showing what did ancient Earth look like. On “Dinosaur Pictures and Facts” web page (dinosaurpictures.org), there’s also an interactive animation. On this page, you can either select the years (i.e. 600 million years ago) or jump to a particular event (i.e. first multicellular life) and see how ancient Earth did look like then. You can also remove the clouds and stop the Earth’s rotation if you want to.
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Most Remote Places on Earth
How far away can you get from everybody else on Earth? A video, published by RealLifeLore channel on YouTube answers this very question. The answer is “actually quite far”, there are a lot of extremely remote places left in the world and some of them have actually yet to be reached by anybody in all of history. The world is an enormous place. Here are the most remote places on Earth.
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Moon has been formed earlier than Earth? The “Synestia Theory” says so
According to a new study, the Moon might have been formed a thousand years earlier than Earth. The new, “synestia theory” suggests a Mars-sized object smashed into the proto-Earth. The “giant impact” vaporized about 10 percent of the rock and liquefied the rest, and created a rapidly spinning donut-shaped mass of vaporized rock called “synestia”. The synestia eventually shrunk and cooled. Computer models demonstrated that the Earth subsequently emerged about 1,000 years after the moon.
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