Here is an interesting reminder how big the solar system really is. These people used a weather balloon to represent the sun. Then the planets were marbles of varying sizes, and they had to be placed miles apart in the Nevada desert to represent the right size. They tried to measure it out accurately, then drove around in the dark and used time lapse photography to capture the orbits. Cool stuff.
Were you wondering what was going on with Star Wars? It’s owned by Disney now, which is concerning, but Episode VII: The Force Awakens is supposed to come out on December 18, 2015. There are also some spinoff movies coming out in the next couple years that take place “in the Star Wars universe” but don’t involve the main characters.
Stellarium is free, open source software that simulates the night sky as it would appear from anywhere anytime (no foolin’ I promise). It’s used by professional planetariums, but you can download it to your Windows, Apple, Linux or Ubuntu machine.
Here’s one more fun thing – a simulation where you can change the mass of the Sun, Earth, or Moon and see how it affects the orbits of all three. If you make the Sun too big, the Earth gets sucked into it, but if you make it too small, the Earth just flies out into space. It just reminds us that we are lucky to be here. There’s also a similar simulation where you can make up your own planets and see how they would orbit a star and each other.
Here is an article called Vast underground ocean discovered on Jupiter’s largest moon. Somehow they can tell by the way the planet bulges out that there is water underneath the surface.
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has the best evidence yet for an underground saltwater ocean on Ganymede, Jupiter’s largest moon. The subterranean ocean is thought to have more water than all the water on Earth’s surface.
This reminded me of Stanislaw Lem’s novel Solaris. About half that book is verbal description of an ocean on an alien planet. It doesn’t sound exciting, but I found it fascinating. This is a case where a picture is not worth a thousand words, because he describes these fantastical geometric shapes that you can picture in your mind’s eye, and yet they could never actually be drawn. It’s even more amazing that the book was written in Polish, and the version available in English is supposedly an English translation of a French translation of the original. Or maybe that has something to do with why the language is so fascinating. I wish I had a copy to pull out a good quote but I don’t have one at the moment.
These two views of Ceres were acquired by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft on Feb. 12, 2015, from a distance of about 52,000 miles (83,000 kilometers) as the dwarf planet rotated. The images have been magnified from their original size. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA
Apparently the Death Star was not destroyed after all.
Cruising through the asteroid belt, NASA Dawn spacecraft is approaching dwarf planet Ceres, and some puzzling features are coming into focus.
“We expected to be surprised by Ceres,” says Chris Russell, principal investigator of the Dawn mission, based at UCLA. “We did not expect to be this puzzled.”
The camera on Dawn can now see Ceres more clearly than any previous image taken of the dwarf planet, revealing craters and mysterious bright spots.
Mysterious bright spots…I find it odd that this article doesn’t even speculate as to what they might be. Just an optical illusion of some sort? A mineral, radioactive or otherwise? Life, intelligent or otherwise? Aliens preparing to invade? Okay, probably not the latter, because if we got to them before they got to us, we are probably the more advanced species of space monkeys.
Incidentally, on the Death Star issue, the article says this thing has a diameter of 605 miles (974 km). According to the definitive source Wookiepedia, the second Death Star had a diameter of 900 km. So it’s about the right size, given that you don’t know how people come up with these things to begin with. For reference, the Moon has a diameter of about 2,100 miles (3,500 km).
Here’s a cool movie on what space colonization could look like. I think it will happen. I don’t know if I’ll see it but I bet my son will see it. I am a little worried though that it won’t look like this, but we’ll just build malls in space.
