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(04/29/20 12:10am)
Matter can be neither created nor destroyed. This is one of the fundamental laws that hold the universe in balance. It is how the atoms and smaller bits in your hands and chair and the sun have been in existence for more than 13 billion years. Of course, energy also can neither be created nor destroyed, but matter itself is simply energy in another form. So you, and your atoms and smaller bits, are part of a universe that started with all the same materials it has now, just in slightly different forms. A natural thought might be bent toward what will become of these bits as the universe carries on without you.
(09/26/19 2:28am)
Let’s cut right to the chase: our planet is warming from the greenhouse gases spewed into the atmosphere by humans. Yes, there are cycles of Earth’s climate that warm and cool over millennia; indeed, the current cycle is one of slight cooling. Yes, there are small, natural contributions from outgassing volcanoes and dairy farms that, while small, are not negligible. The current rise in global temperature cannot, however, be described without including man-made gas emissions.
(03/07/19 3:45am)
The All-Star basketball player could escape the gravitational pull of an asteroids and some comets.
(03/07/19 3:33am)
The longest and farthest-running rover mission comes to a close
(10/11/18 10:59pm)
Currently, you and I (and everyone in North America) are shifting farther from Eurasia at a rate of about an inch every year. A mid-ocean ridge stretches from above Antarctica through Iceland and is constantly oozing fresh lava, causing that gradual spreading of the sea floor. As the ridge produces fresh rock on either side, it forms a series of stripes running roughly parallel to the ridge. The stripes correspond to the ages of each subsequent formation, with the innermost stripes being the youngest. Lining either side of the new rocks are parallel bands of the same age, getting older as distance from the ridge increases.
(09/18/18 2:06am)
Life as we know it is only possible with the help of carbon. Inside of all organic molecules is a carbon atom, and those atoms were forged in the center of massive stars.
(11/13/17 12:15am)
If you’ve been paying attention to astronomical journals or have spoken to me in the past week, you invariably know about the recent neutron star merger that took place 130 million years before Aug. 17.
(10/20/17 12:43am)
As I stepped outside the other morning, I was shocked by the lingering warmth of the Sun. Mad as I was, I always take a moment to appreciate the importance of our star and others like it. Without the Sun, we would have no heat, no light, no solid ground to walk on, not even the life to appreciate our position in space. To be sure, our Sun didn’t create the elements we walk on, nor did it create the necessary building blocks for life. For that, we must look at stars that are massive enough to fuse ions into iron.
(09/28/17 12:55am)
I was talking with Chuck Greenlee the other day — he’s my roommate when he’s not editing columns for The Post — and he asked what happened to light that gets shined into the sky. That’s easy, I replied, as light travels infinitely far until it come into contact with something that absorbs it. It effectively propagates forever. But then I got to thinking, and that’s not quite accurate — light does travel forever, until it doesn’t.
(09/13/17 10:35pm)
Thirty-six million miles from the Sun simmers a ball of rock and iron that, for the past four billion years, has been shrinking. But before we get into the contraction of its mantle, we must first look at Mercury’s history.
(04/24/17 7:53pm)
At dawn, two things rise in the sky. First, is the Sun, the glowing ball of hydrogen plasma around which Earth orbits. Second, is a new Moon. From our perspective, the Moon is between us and the Sun and is showing its near side to us fully shadowed. It will set at sunset, slightly after the sun. As is traverses the sky, the Moon moves west at a lunar-diameter per hour. Over the course of a day it will have lagged behind the Sun by 6 degrees. After 27 days, the Moon will be back to its original position. The Sun however, is not in the same position. As Earth orbits the Sun, even in as little as a month, it moves further around the Sun and we are looking at it at a different angle. So the waning crescent Moon takes a few more days to make it back to the new moon phase. The Moon has now completed one orbit of Earth. No other body in the solar system moves in this fashion.
(04/18/17 12:05am)
As Earth moves around the Sun, the Sun makes a slow progression through the sky. Generally, you can’t see it because the sunlight scatters off of the atmosphere and turns the sky an opaque blue. Each day it moves a little bit farther east.
(04/12/17 10:00am)
Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated which day Ohio University's observatory will officially open. The event is on May 6. The article has been updated.
(04/10/17 2:09am)
(Before reading, I suggest downloading the free app Mars Globe as a reference. Since Mars has a readily visible surface, most of the features have been named. The app will help keep track of them.)
(04/03/17 2:24am)
Having written about the massive planets (and one shrouded moon) of the outer solar system now seems as good a time as any to talk about the boundary separating the gas giants and the neighborhood of the terrestrial planets. Between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter lies a sparsely populated region of very small bits of rock called the Asteroid Belt. I use sparsely here to say that the asteroids themselves are numerous (somewhere between one and two million notable ones) but they are spread very thinly throughout the 200 million mile region. When picturing the belt, some might think of that scene from Star Wars, with many large rocks zipping around perilously close the spaceship unlucky enough to pass through.
(03/29/17 12:12am)
Half a century after Galileo discovered the four large moons of Jupiter, an astronomer named Huygens pointed his telescope at Saturn in hopes of finding one in orbit around the ringed giant. He discovered five moons in total. Another astronomer, Cassini, discovered another four. Two more were discovered by William Herschel, whose son John gave names to all the satellites. He suggested they be named after the Titans, the brothers and sisters of Saturn. The largest of the satellites was simply called Titan. It is more than 96 percent of the total mass of the Saturnian satellite system, including all of the rings. It is the second most massive moon in the solar system singularly, and in relation to its gas giant, it is the most massive satellite — a titan indeed.
(03/20/17 1:57am)
If you find yourself heading north this spring, take a moment in the evening to look at the Big Dipper. It’s is the larger of Ursa Major’s two asterisms — an asterism being a recognizable shape within an existing constellation. Ursa Major is the Great Bear, with an abnormally long tail. The tail is what makes up the handle of the Big Dipper. The Dipper is a useful asterism to find your way around the sky. The two end stars of the bowl align with Polaris, the North Star. On the other end, if you follow the handle of the Dipper, it points to the fourth brightest star in the sky — Arcturus in Boötes. If you look after 10 p.m., it looks like the handle then extends east to Spica. (Not the really bright one, it’s the dimmer of the two.) Spica is the brightest star in Virgo and paired with Jupiter, the second brightest planet. I have spent a good amount of time describing Jupiter in relation to the other gas giants, so I’ll instead use this article to talk about Io.
(03/13/17 1:36am)
Once every 29 years, Saturn makes a circuit of the night sky. That is quick compared to Neptune’s 165 year orbit, but Neptune isn’t visible to the naked eye. Being one of five “wandering stars” known to Greek astronomers, the slow moving object was called Cronus, named for the god of time. The god was father to Zeus and son of Ouranos, or as the Romans called them: Jupiter and Uranus. It moved slower than Jupiter in the night sky — nearly three times as slow — so it had to be further away than Jupiter. (Uranus, then, fit nicely after Saturn once discovered.)
(03/06/17 3:36am)
Around every star there is a region where the frigid abyss of space is balanced by the searing heat of nuclear fusion in such a way that water can flow as a liquid. For our particular star, this region is roughly centered between Earth and Mars. Mars, as you might know, is much too cold for abundant liquid water. Earth, on the other hand, is covered in water in the form of oceans, clouds, and glaciers. In our current understanding of how life forms, liquid water is a crucially important. Watery Earth is teeming with life, due in part to its orbit in a narrow zone. Any closer to or further from the Sun and water would boil away or freeze solid. Between those boundaries lies a region called the habitable zone. When looking for signs of life in an otherwise cold and dead universe, that is the place to look.
(02/27/17 3:15am)
The New General Catalogue, as it stands today, has 7840 entries of various galaxies, nebulae and star clusters. It is based in part on the findings of William Herschel and his list of deep sky objects — over 2000 objects in total — compiled in 1786. Herschel spent many nights in his backyard with handmade telescopes, fixing their heights and letting the Earth revolve, passing the night sky before his lens. Another night, he would adjust the height and observe another swath. Soon, he had the entire sky mapped. During the time he was searching for double stars (they’re more common that you’d think), he noticed a pale blue orb showing a disk rather than a sharp point of light. At first, he thought it to be a comet, though he was perplexed as to why it did not have a discernable tail. As a comet nears the Sun, the ices in it begin to steam and trail behind, though this object — which was clearly within the solar system — did not. As more observations were made, by Herschel and astronomers abroad, the object’s orbit was able to be calculated as nearly circular, quite unlike the highly elliptical orbit of comets.