This year, our eyes were once again redirected to our own Solar System for a just a few fleeting
minutes -- from the myriad wonders of our “seeable” Universe to a small space probe called New
Horizons that at 7:49 AM (EST) on July 14 th 2015 passed within 7,750 miles of little Pluto at a
record-breaking speed of 30,800 miles per hour (49,600 kilometers per hour).
We’ve all shown Saturn to someone, or perhaps have shared a clear view of a bright globular, say, M13, with someone who hasn’t seen such a thing before. In these and similar cases, the sheer beauty of the thing is the whole point; any impressive facts are secondary.
“It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it?” -- Richard Feynman (1918 – 1988)
For most of human history, the night sky demanded our attention. The shape-shifting Moon, wandering planets, pointillist stars, and occasional comet enchanted our sensibilities...
Spot naked-eye exoplanet host stars!
Want to see something new in the night sky? To date, more than 700 exoplanetary systems have been identified in...
To form a solar system, the literature says that in a simulation like this we can ignore the gravity of the Sun and just concentrate on the interaction of the objects in the protoplanetary disk.The gas, dust and other objects rotate around the forming Sun in Keplerian orbital motion...
Blue wavelengths of light are damaging to many forms of life, and glare from unshielded light compromises road safety and infiltrates bedrooms, suppressing melatonin production, undermining sleep quality and duration, and exacerbating susceptibility to many kinds of illness...
I have no doubt that we will become an interplanetary species,
within two decades and that we will likely find the existence of life, or past life, on another
planetary body, within the next decade.
Sobel’s most recent novel The Glass Universe (2016) is split into three parts, “The Colors of Starlight,” “Oh, Be A Fine Girl, Kiss Me,” and “In the Depths Above.” Each part is further structured quite nicely into titled chapters that relate to the subject or person of interest. The book’s sweep is chronological, starting with Mary Anna Palmer Draper – the wife of astronomer Henry Draper.
