About 70,000 years ago, a wandering binary stellar system passed through the Solar System’s Oort cloudNotes 1, within 120,000 AU (0.58 pc; 1.9 ly) of the Sun. 70,000 years is just a blink of an eye compared to the Earth’s age, which is 4.543 billion years. Our ancestors were about to left Africa at that time. The binary system is dubbed as Scholz’s StarNotes 2, after its discoverer. Comets perturbed from the Oort cloud would require roughly 2 million years to get to the inner Solar System. So, in the distant future, some of these comets may hit the Earth and cause mass extinctions, like the “dinosaur killer” Chicxulub impactor which impacted a few miles from the present-day town of Chicxulub in Mexico around 66 million years ago.
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Top 15 Largest Birds in the World
Birds (Aves) range in size and weight from the 5 cm (2 in) and 1.6-2 grams bee hummingbird to the 2.75 m (9 ft) and 104-156 kg (229-344 lbs) ostrich. Here are the top 15 largest birds in the world (by body weight).
Birds form one of six basic animal groups, with the others being amphibians, fish, invertebrates, mammals and reptiles. They are endothermic vertebrates, characterized by feathers, toothless beaked jaws, a high metabolic rate, a four-chambered heart, and a lightweight but strong skeleton. They reproduce by laying of hard-shelled eggs (eggs fertilize inside the female). The fossil record indicates that birds are the last surviving group of dinosaurs. So, they are also termed avian dinosaurs.
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Total Solar Eclipse 2017 Images From Space
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.
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TRAPPIST-1 System May Contain Water
On February 22, 2017, NASA astronomers have announced that seven Earth-sized planets have been discovered around an ultra-cool dwarf star named TRAPPIST-1 which is located around 39 light-years from the Earth. And what’s more – three of them are orbiting their star in the habitable zone. Then, an international team of astronomers led by the Swiss astronomer Vincent Bourrier from the Observatoire de l’Université de Genève used the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to estimate whether there might be water on the planets of TRAPPIST-1 system. Now, on August 31, 2017, the team announced that their findings suggest that “the outer planets of the system might still harbor substantial amounts of water”, including the three planets within the habitable zone of the star – TRAPPIST-1e, f, and g. This result lends further weight to the possibility that these planets may indeed be habitable.
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Huge Asteroid “3122 Florence” flyby video
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.
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Is Earth as smooth as a billiard ball? No, here’s why
You may have heard it has been said that if our planet were shrunk down to the size of a billiard ball, it would be smoother than it. In other words, the Earth is smoother than a billiard ball. Is that true?
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Largest dinosaurs ever lived
Identifying the largest dinosaurs ever lived isn’t an easy task, because it’s very rare to unearth a complete fossil. Furthermore, only a tiny percentage of these amazing animals ever fossilized, and most of these “lucky” bodies will remain buried underground forever. So, we may never know exactly what dinosaur was the biggest (or the tiniest) ever.
Despite this fact, size always has been one of the most interesting aspects of these prehistoric animals. There are extreme variations in their size, from the tiny hummingbirds, which can weigh as little as three grams, to the titanosaurs, which could weigh as much as 70 tonnes, or even more.
Here are some of the largest dinosaurs ever lived.
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What would happen if the Earth stopped rotating?
The Earth rotates from west to east with a linear velocity of 465.1013 m/s (1674.365 km/h) at the equator. But what would happen if the Earth stopped rotating abruptly? Online magazine Tech Insider presented a video demonstrating the development of events in this case.
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Why Do We See Only One Side of the Moon?
You have probably heard references made to the “dark side” of the Moon – there’s even a Pink Floyd album with that name. But, in fact, there’s no “dark side” of the moon. Because it is not illuminated by the Earth, it is illuminated by the Sun. All the surface of the moon lit by the Sun as the Moon rotates.
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Dolomites from an Eagle’s Point of View (360° HD Interactive Video)
An amazing video published by RedBull channel: with that 360° HD Interactive video, you can explore the Northeastern Italy’s Dolomites from an eagle’s point of view.
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