In less than a week, you can see as many as 50-100 meteors per hour!The Perseid Meteor Shower (or “The Perseids”) is considered one of the best meteor showers of the year, according to NASA.Each year, Earth passes through a trail of debris left by the comet Swift-Tuttle. When that space debris enters Earth’s atmosphere, … Read more
Mercury is the smallest planet in the Solar System, but most of the distance from its centre to its surface passes through metal. NASA puts the radius of Mercury’s metallic core at about 2,074 kilometres, compared with a planetary radius of 2,440 kilometres. That is roughly 85 per cent of the planet’s radius. The percentage … Read more
Titan is never quite the same distance away twice. Depending on where Earth and Saturn happen to be in their orbits when you ask, the gap between us and Saturn’s largest moon runs from around 1.2 billion kilometres at its closest to about 1.65 billion at its farthest, a swing of roughly 450 million kilometres, … Read more
Voyager 1’s power test came back at the end of July, and by Kareem Badaruddin’s own account it went about as well as an engineer could hope. Badaruddin is the Voyager project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and what he’s describing is the early stage of an attempt to do for Voyager 1 what … Read more
The Perseid summer light show is back, and viewing conditions are especially promising across the northern hemisphere.The meteor shower’s is expected to peak on Wednesday night into Thursday morning, and coincides with a total solar eclipse across Spain, Iceland and Greenland and a six-planet parade – though the best time to view the fireballs will … Read more
Julien Kimmig’s career began with a surprising abundance of feces. As a PhD student working at a Cambrian site in northern Canada, Kimmig realized that roughly half the fossils in that outcrop were coprolites, or fossilized poops. Kimmig, now the head of the paleontology and evolution division at the Natural History Museum in Karlsruhe, Germany, … Read more
After lunch on Wednesday, two Nasa aviators will climb into a research plane and take off from Keflavik airport on a western tip of Iceland. They will climb north towards Greenland and then bank to head south on a gently curving course 40 miles (64km) off the Icelandic coast.Their mission can be described as chasing … Read more
Every total solar eclipse is different. While the silhouette of the moon passing across the sun barely changes, the moment our natural satellite covers the entire solar disk, something spectacular happens — the emergence of the corona. The Latin word for “crown”, the solar corona is one of the wonders of nature. To gaze upon … Read more
NEW YORK (AP) — The Perseid summer light show is back — and viewing conditions are especially promising for the Northern Hemisphere.The meteor shower’s peak Wednesday night into Thursday morning coincides with a total solar eclipse across Spain, Iceland and Greenland and a six-planet parade — though the best time to view the fireballs will … Read more
In Greek mythology, Chronos (not the guy who ate his kids), the primordial god of time, was depicted as a giant snake with three heads: a man, a bull, and a lion. Chronos and his consort, the goddess of inevitability, Ananke, circle around the cosmos and drive the rotation of heaven and the eternal passage … Read more