Stephen Tremp's Blog, page 25

I is for Ida (Planets Aren't The Objects in Space with Moons)

Dactyl and IdaMany planets have moons. But guess what. So do some asteroids.  Just as 17th century astronomer Galileo Galilei was first to see moons around another planet, the 20th century spacecraft named in his honor was the first to discover a moon orbiting an asteroid.  In 1993 while on its way to Jupiter, NASA’s Galileo spacecraft flew right by an asteroid called Ida. It’s 19 miles wide and has a small one mile wide moon orbiting it called Dactyl. These were the first binary as...

H is for Heliosphere (This Is Exciting Stuff!!!)

The Heliosphere is often described as a kind of bubble that contains our solar system. This magnetic sphere, which extends beyond Pluto, is caused by the Sun’s solar winds.  These winds spread out from the Sun at around 400 km/s until they hit what is known as interstellar space, which is also called local interstellar medium (LISM) or interstellar gas. Interstellar space is the space in galaxies that is unoccupied by either stars or planets.  When the solar winds hit local interste...

G is for Galaxies

Our Milky Way. Home Sweet home. A Galaxy is a massive, gravitationally bound system that consists of stars and stellar remnants, an interstellar medium of gas and dust.  Examples of galaxies range from dwarfs with as few as ten million stars to giants with a hundred trillion stars, each orbiting their galaxy’s own center of mass.   The word galaxy comes from the Greek word for "milky".  There are probably more than 170 billion galaxies in the observable universe.  Galaxies...

F is for Fireball (The NASA All-sky Fireball Network) and 2014 Celestial Calendar

The NASA All-sky Fireball Network is a network of cameras set up by the NASA Meteoroid Environment Office (MEO) with the goal of observing meteors brighter than the planet Venus, which are called fireballs. The collected data will be used by the MEO in constructing models of the meteoroid environment, which are important to spacecraft designers.   The network currently consists of 12 cameras, 6 of which are placed in locations in north Alabama, north Georgia, southern Tennessee, and south...

E is for Exoplanets

Exoplanet: An exoplanet is any planet located outside our solar system.  The Goldilocks Zone, or the Habitable Zone: The region around a star within which planetary-mass objects with sufficient atmospheric pressure can support liquid water at their surfaces. Translation: they can support intelligent life.  * The search for exoplanets has been in full tilt since the 1970s, but the first one was discovered by accident in 1992.  * Kepler is a space observatory launched by NASA to...

D is for Dreams and the Answer to Yesterday’s Cosmology Trivia Question

The latest and greatest theories on dreaming. Which could change tomorrow. Snarky remarks my own ...
 * You forget roughly nine out of ten of your dreams. Bummer. These are probably the ones that could make you a million dollars.
* Everybody dreams. Including blind people. So do animals. Not sure about aliens though.  * If you’re snoring, you’re not dreaming. Get a CPAP.  * The Bible is loaded with dreams and symbolism. So are fictional books such as Harry Potter.  *...

C is for Cosmology

Fun Facts (at least fun theories) about our cosmos:  • The Universe spans a diameter of over 150 billion light years.  • There Are at Least 10 Billion Trillion Stars in the Universe  • Our Galaxy Is on a Collision Course with the Andromeda Galaxy  • The Earth is not flat – but the Universe is not. Based on Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, there are three possible shapes that the Universe may take: open, closed, and flat. Once again, measurements by WMAP on the CMBR...

B is for Brain, IWSG, and ALF Trivia Answer

Fun Facts (according to research) about our brains: The blood vessels in the brain laid end to end would wrap around the Earth four times, or about 100,000 miles.  According to a study published in The New England Journal of Medicine, adults who participated in mind-challenging activities were 63 percent less likely to develop dementia.  Children who learn two languages before the age of five alters the brain structure and adults have a much denser gray matter.  The averag...

A is for Alien

My A to Z Theme: The Wonders and Oddities of our Universe  A Is For Aliens  Quick: What is your image of what an alien would look like the very first time you see one? Green. Slender. Big bulging eyes. Bald. Really long fingers. We come in peace. E.T. Close Encounters of the Third Kind? A.L.F.?  This is what a lot of people would say. Or you might be inclined to picture a hideous monster from your worst nightmares. Predator. Alien. War of the Worlds. The Blob. Killer Klowns fro...

Final Stop and Last A to Z Tip

Last Stop: The final destination to the Escalation Blog Tour is with L. Diane Wolfe. This is appropriate as Dian is all about promoting and such, and I recap what went right and what did not go as well as I expected with the release of Escalation: The Adventures of Chase Manhattan.  Final A to Z Tip: Make sure your settings allow for comments on comments. I often like to add to a comment someone leaves but cannot because the host does not have their blog set up for this. So make sure peo...