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July 11 - July 25, 2022
everyone can love art, music, poetry, politics, engineering, science, and math all at the same time.
When Nichols was asked by NASA to be part of the publicity campaign to recruit astronauts, her insistence that the astronaut corps include members of all races and genders helped create the diversity of humans in space today.
At Concordia, a European science station based in Antarctica, about a dozen intrepid people spend months at a time together in perpetual darkness, farther from civilization than the International Space Station is from Earth.
That’s like watching Columbus sail out of the harbor.”
All these comparisons of space travel to Europeans coming to America are so gross
In one single underground deposit alone scientists have found a huge slab of frozen water—ice that’s six times the area of New England and more than 100 feet deep.
Water on Mars!
Blue cheese gets its flavor and color from the penicillin fungus
Fritz Zwicky (1898–1974) himself couldn’t solve the problem. What Zwicky did figure out was that in an area of space called the Coma cluster, galaxies were moving so fast that the cluster should have dispersed long ago. He hypothesized that there must have been more mass in the Coma cluster than what was visible.
Things once considered weird—like the Great Attractor, a single area in the universe toward which huge amounts of matter, including our own galaxy, seem to be falling—are now often chalked up to dark matter doing its thing. ■
Vera Rubin (b. 1928) pushed the frontier of cosmic understanding from the very start of her career. Two decades before cosmic large-scale structure was confirmed, Rubin concluded in her 1954 doctoral dissertation that galaxies were clustered unevenly throughout the universe. Her work on the rotational motion of the outskirts of spiral galaxies proved that galaxies are embedded within huge halos of dark matter that far outweigh their stars. She was the first woman to make her own observations as an official guest investigator at Palomar Observatory in California, and the second woman ever to be
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Could it be that our understanding of the laws of physics is fundamentally wrong? ■
Could anything else destroy a black hole? Black holes could crash into one another. In 2015 such an event, more than a billion light-years from Earth, was detected by the burst of gravitational wave radiation it emitted. The black holes weren’t destroyed, though—they just merged to make an even bigger black hole. ■
The largest black hole that could have evaporated since the big bang would have to have been smaller than an atomic nucleus.
“We see black holes in the center of every galaxy we’ve had the power to look into…and
he and his wife often used racial slurs
“If you look far enough, you’re actually seeing the cooling off of the universe, or the transition between when it was a plasma, and opaque, to where it became clear space. And that’s the microwave background that we see.”■
“At the big bang, you have all of this energy in a very small volume, and it is so hot, it is so energetic, that matter is forming out of the energy, according to E = mc2
if you ever hit the speed of light, then time stops.
Photons, which are the carriers of light, exist at the speed of light. A photon doesn’t accelerate from zero to the speed of light in 2.4 seconds; it exists at the speed of light.
If you are a photon and you are emitted from across the universe, you will be absorbed, you will slam into whatever you were destined to hit, as far as you are concerned, ...
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“We explore the solar system and the rest of the cosmos with our robots, which are basically our eyes and our ears. So it’s great: I get to go explore the cosmos from the comfort of my couch, which I love. I can still eat doughnuts…It’s a much better life.” —DR. AMY MAINZER, ASTROPHYSICIST
Are Robots “Them” or “Us”?
Newton’s third law of motion—for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction—means that the simple act of pushing is enough; you don’t need to push on or off any external object or surface to generate motion.
“Europa is NASA’s top priority for a big mission, because it’s one of the places where there ought to be life, if we’re right about what it takes for life. There’s an ocean, we think, beneath this icy crust. In fact, it may be our solar system’s biggest ocean of liquid water.”
if you’re a comet coming from far out in the solar system and you’re aiming towards Earth, you’ve got to get past Jupiter.
If it weren’t for Jupiter, you can justifiably question whether Earth could have ever made it from simple life to complex life.” ■
Astronomers think much of Earth’s oceans could have been formed by comets striking our planet and depositing their water on Earth’s surface.
“Half of the stars you see aren’t solo stars at all. They’re double, multiple, triple, quadruple star systems. Even, for example, the nearest star to the sun, Alpha Centauri, that’s a multiple star system.”
In life, lots of things occupy two or more classifications,
METEOR These are “shooting stars”—objects that burn up in Earth’s atmosphere as they fall, leaving an ethereal streak of light. Most meteors are the size of a grain of sand.
“It’s kind of a continuum…We used to think that they were two totally different things, and now we know that there’s a gray area in between…Sometimes
“If you can’t have ownership, no one’s going to go out there and extract the materials, and the loser is humanity.”
Capitalism is sad
We took the spectroscope—the prism—take light, move it through the prism, out the other side. It breaks up into its component colors, like a rainbow, and in there you find embedded the fingerprints of the very chemical identity of what it is you’re looking at.
the American lands they had conquered.
“We went to the moon, looking to discover it, and we looked back and we discovered Earth for the first time.”
“The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines…every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”
Meteor Crater A 150-foot-wide metallic meteor struck the Mogollon Rim in modern-day Arizona 50,000 years ago, leaving a mile-wide hole that’s 60 stories deep.
Chesapeake Bay A mile-wide meteor hit the Eastern Shore of the United States 35 million years ago, pushing the surrounding land downward. That indentation eventually filled with water.
Chicxulub About 65 million years ago, a 10-mile-wide meteor pounded the planet, off the coast of modern-day Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. Its impact on Earth’s atmosphere may have led to the extinction of the dinosaurs.
typical human adults constantly experience nearly 20 tons of force on their bodies, just from Earth’s atmosphere!
The Sun heats the ground, and the ground heats the air. Visible light hits Earth and heats it. Earth reradiates that same energy as infrared, and it’s the infrared that gets trapped by the greenhouse gases.”
Twinkling happens when the light from a distant point travels through that atmosphere; its light beam dances ever so slightly in random directions many times—sometimes thousands of times—each second.
I wonder what it's like to see the stars from outsie the atmosphere...
“Every time you turn a bigger telescope to the night sky, we end up smaller than we had previously imagined…It is an ego-dismantling device,”
JWST will be sensitive to both optical and infrared light. Its adaptive optics will be able to pick out infant galaxies as well as planets orbiting distant stars.
So neat reading about this after seeing the newly released photos!
you take a swig of water…It contains water molecules that have passed through the kidneys of Abraham Lincoln, of Genghis Khan, of Jesus…”
Parts of Mars’ surface is very close to the triple point of water, when it can be solid, liquid, and steam at the same time.
“Frozen water is less dense than liquid water…and ice floats. In the winter, the top surface [of a lake] gets cold. The top water will freeze, and not drop, thereby insulating the liquid water below, protecting the fishes through the winter months. It’s a remarkable feature of water.”
foreign companies have come in, privatized local water supplies, and then raised rates and literally killed poor people who can’t afford those higher water rates.”
“The governments wanted to get white men to move out into the western states, to settle the states, to take [land] away from the Mexicans and the Indians. So what they did is, they said, ‘If you come out here, you can own the water—and as much as you can use, you own it.’
Since the dawn of agriculture, every society that experienced a significant climate change was either dispersed or destroyed, and died out. If climate change happens to us, will we share the same fate? ■
Pockets of warm air rise upward, leaving a zone of low pressure below it; other air flows into that zone to equalize the pressure: That creates wind.
