Solar System
esiegel | March 23, 2015“Studying whether there’s life on Mars or studying how the universe began, there’s something magical about pushing back the frontiers of knowledge. That’s something that is almost part of being human, and I’m certain that will continue.” -Sally Ride
When Curiosity landed on the martian surface in 2012, surviving "seven minutes of terror," it went straight to work, examining its surroundings and teaching us about the martian geology of its region.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science Systems, via http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/multimedia/pia16453.html#.VQYFwmR….
But by…
esiegel | March 16, 2015“Curiosity is the essence of human existence. ‘Who are we? Where are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going?’… I don’t know. I don’t have any answers to those questions. I don’t know what’s over there around the corner. But I want to find out.” -Eugene Cernan, last human on the Moon
It's been nearly 43 years since humans have set foot on the Moon, and yet we've never forgotten what it looks like.
Image credit: NASA / Apollo 17 / East view of station 1, via http://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/apollopanoramas/.
Yet nothing that anyone can describe -- either about what it was like or…
esiegel | March 3, 2015“Since you cannot do good to all, you are to pay special attention to those who, by the accidents of time, or place, or circumstances, are brought into closer connection with you.” -St. Augustine
When you look up at the sky, all the twinkling lights -- the stars -- appear to be fixed.
Image credit: The Curious Skywatcher, via http://curiousskywatcher.blogspot.com/2012/04/zodiacal-light-your-best-….
But littered among them are the non-twinkling wanderers: the planets. Just 11 days ago, the Mars/Venus conjunction occurred, giving us a spectacular view of two naked-eye planets separated by a…
esiegel | February 26, 2015“The moon was like this awesome, romantic, mysterious thing, hanging up there in the sky where you could never reach it, no matter how much you wanted to. But you’re right. Once you’re actually here, it’s just a big, dull rock.” -Futurama
Oh, but the big dull rocks are fascinating in their own right. Especially, mind you, when there are more of them than we ever expected. Jupiter, for example, has not only all the moons that orbit around it, but a whole slew of gravitationally captured objects -- the Trojans (and Greeks) -- that orbit in front and behind it.
Image credit: Petr Scheirich,…
esiegel | February 16, 2015“In the year 1456 … a Comet was seen passing Retrograde between the Earth and the sun… Hence I dare venture to foretell, that it will return again in the year 1758.” -Edmond Halley
When ESA's Rosetta mission "caught" its target, Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in August, 2014, one of its main science goals was to watch the comet become active from up close.
Image credit: ESA/Rosetta/NAVCAM — CC BY-SA IGO 3.0, via http://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/Images/2015/02/Comet_on_31_January_201….
Half a year later, the flux of particles being emitted by the comet has intensified tremendously, and so…
esiegel | February 9, 2015“Girls blush, sometimes, because they are alive, half wishing they were dead to save the shame. The sudden blush devours them, neck and brow; They have drawn too near the fire of life, like gnats, and flare up bodily, wings and all. What then? Who’s sorry for a gnat or girl?” -Elizabeth Barrett Browning
As viewed from Earth, total eclipses of the Sun are relatively rare things, happening less than once a year on average and even then, rarely occurring over heavily populated areas. Nevertheless, thousands or even millions of people flock to catch these spectacular, inimitable sights.
Image…
esiegel | February 7, 2015“When I look at the moon I do not see a hostile, empty world. I see the radiant body where man has taken his first steps into a frontier that will never end.” -David Scott, Commander, Apollo 15
The Moon is perhaps the oldest sight known to humans and our animal ancestors here on Earth, with its features mostly unchanged for billions of years. Have a listen to Camera Obscura sing their soothing song,
Lunar Sea,
while you consider that for nearly all of human history, we were only able to see just barely over 50% of the Moon.
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons user Tomruen, viahttp://en.…
esiegel | February 4, 2015“The dance between darkness and light will always remain — the stars and the moon will always need the darkness to be seen, the darkness will just not be worth having without the moon and the stars.” -C. JoyBell C.
Yet what do you do when you discover a moon that itself straddles the border between light-and-dark? It might sound like something out of a fantasy novel, but it isn't: it's exactly what we get when it comes to the second of Saturn's moons ever discovered: Iapetus.
Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Space Science Institute / Cassini.
While some of its mysteries remain elusive,…
esiegel | January 29, 2015“Even in hindsight, I would not change one whit of the Voyager experience. Dreams and sweat carried it off. But most of all, its legacy makes us all Earth travelers among the stars.” -Charley Kohlhase
It's a taxing enough task to launch something off the surface of the Earth, escaping our planet's gravity and finding our way into interplanetary space.
Image credit: Delta II rocket launch, public domain, via http://www.gps.gov/.
But to reach the outer Solar System? To go beyond the gas giants and even escape from our Sun's pull completely? We need a little help to do that. Thankfully, the…
esiegel | January 29, 2015“From an incandescent mass we have originated, and into a frozen mass we shall turn. Merciless is the law of nature, and rapidly and irresistibly we are drawn to our doom.” -Nikola Tesla
Stability: it's the hallmark of the Solar System. The motions of all the planetary bodies are regular and periodic. The paths of the various objects never cross, and everything that has continued for billions of years should continue, undisturbed, for billions more.
Image credit: Mark Garlick / Science Photo Library.
Unless, of course, something came along to mess that up! In our Solar System, the comets…
esiegel | January 19, 2015“But even when the moon looks like it’s waning…it’s actually never changing shape. Don’t ever forget that.” -Ai Yazawa
You've seen the iconic crescent, quarter, gibbous and full phases for yourself, and probably even an eclipse or two. For millennia, the Moon has fascinated, delighted and mystified observers of the skies. Less than 50 years ago, in fact, we walked on it for the first time.
Image credit: NASA / Apollo 11.
Yet even when we did so, we had no idea where our Moon actually came from! We're the only planet in the entire Solar System with a Moon that's such a large percentage of…
esiegel | January 1, 2015“And now we welcome the new year. Full of things that have never been.” -Rainer Maria Rilke
Yes, it's true, with 2015 upon us, the new year holds a number of wonderful new things. Not only for us, but for the Universe as well!
Image credit: Stuart Rickard of After Ice, viahttp://blog.after-ice.com/stuart-rickard/.
Consider all the time that's passed, leading up to today. Consider how far we've come, from the Big Bang until right now, as "one Universe year," and now imagine, looking forward, what the next Universe year (or years) will hold.
Image credit: NASA, ESA, J. Jee (University of…
esiegel | December 23, 2014“It is always the simple that produces the marvelous.” -Amelia Barr
All things being equal, the simplest explanation is usually the best. At least, that's how Occam's razor is most commonly phrased these days. Yet, when it comes to the headlines -- whether it's a "discovery" of dark matter or "evidence" for life on Mars -- you have to wonder what "simple" actually means.
Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / SAM-GSFC / Univ. of Michigan.
The answer isn't what most people suspect, and it shouldn't really be up for debate. If you want to hypothesize that something novel is occurring, something…
esiegel | December 22, 2014“When you look at the stars and the galaxy, you feel that you are not just from any particular piece of land, but from the solar system.” -Kalpana Chawla
Two weeks ago, we released the first video in our web series: Genesis, the story of where all this comes from.
The video was on Organic Molecules, and while it hasn't exactly gone viral (yet), the like/dislike ratio is pretty hard to beat.
Well, it's time for Episode 2, on the topic of the Solar System. Head on over to Medium to watch the whole thing, along with an official transcript as well!
esiegel | December 21, 2014“Astronomers are greatly disappointed when, having traveled halfway around the world to see an eclipse, clouds prevent a sight of it; and yet a sense of relief accompanies the disappointment.” -Simon Newcomb
For most of us, news of a total solar eclipse -- even though they happen (on average) once every three years -- seems distant and remote, and far from the possibility of us enjoying it. Have a listen to the Cat Stevens classic,
Moonshadow,
while you consider how rare it is to have the Moon's shadow fall on us.For those of us in the United States, we haven't seen a total solar eclipse…
esiegel | December 18, 2014“In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.” -Albert Camus
This Sunday marks the Winter Solstice: the darkest, longest evening of the year for all the Earth's northern hemisphere denizens.
Image credit: Ken Tape, of the Winter Solstice at Fairbanks, Alaska.
Sure, you probably know all about Earth's axial tilt and how the southern hemisphere experiences the summer solstice at the same time, but here are a few solstice facts that you might not know, including what it means for the Moon, for new year's celebrations, and for our history of venturing…
esiegel | December 9, 2014“Men of genius are often dull and inert in society; as the blazing meteor, when it descends to earth, is only a stone.” -Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Sure, sure, and they're not even big, impressive stones. But like any real estate agent will tell you, location is everything.
Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / W. Reach (SSC/Caltech).
And when your tiny, pebble-sized stone originates from an asteroid that crosses Earth's orbit and leaves a debris trail behind, that "only a stone" can appear as so much more.
Image credit: Stéphane Guisard (Los Cielos de America), TWAN, via http://apod.nasa.…
esiegel | December 4, 2014“Mars once was wet and fertile. It’s now bone dry. Something bad happened on Mars. I want to know what happened on Mars so that we may prevent it from happening here on Earth.” -Neil deGrasse Tyson
No, what happened on Mars isn't in any danger of happening here on Earth, despite what your sci-fi horror films might have you believe. We're a long way from becoming a dry, cold, barren desert wasteland like our neighboring world.
Image credit: NASA / Viking Orbiter.
But just because we're not in danger of that doesn't mean that it isn't vitally important to understand what exactly happened on…
esiegel | December 3, 2014“I have announced this star as a comet, but since it is not accompanied by any nebulosity and, further, since its movement is so slow and rather uniform, it has occurred to me several times that it might be something better than a comet.” -Giuseppe Piazzi
Shakespeare said a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet, and yet, what of Pluto? Is it just as sweet without the name of "planet" attached to it?
Image credit: Don Dixon of http://cosmographica.com/.
There's always room for nuance, but here are some words you may find useful:
The fact that there are other things out there that…
milhayser | December 2, 2014On Pharyngula, PZ Myers criticizes a stirring new short film imagining humanity's presence on the far-flung worlds of our solar system. PZ writes, "There’s nothing in those exotic landscapes as lovely and rich as mossy and majestic cedars of the Olympic Peninsula, or the rocky sea stacks of the nearby coast." So let's not get ahead of ourselves in turning Earth into a dust bowl. On Respectful Insolence, Orac considers the demerits of a new monograph on 'integrative oncology,' saying it's a false dichotomy polarizing aspects of actual science and pure wishful thinking. And on Uncertain…