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.
According to recent popular science articles, there has been something of a revival of the traditional idea that our Milky Way is a 4-armed spiral galaxy, as opposed to having two spiral arms, as seen in the currently most popular rendition of our home Galaxy.
If you have never heard of the Herschels, then you are missing out on the most important astronomers of the 18 th and 19 th Century. William Herschel, discoverer of Uranus,
together with his able and dedicated sister Caroline and his erudite son John revealed the Milky Way and its diverse contents as never before.
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...
More than fifty years ago, Apollo 15 photographed something unusual on the far side of the Moon. In a panoramic photograph taken from lunar orbit, two bright, sharply defined objects stood out from the otherwise subdued landscape on the floor of a crater called Paracelsus C.
Today we can take a much closer look.
By now, you have probably read or heard that our polluting ways have reached a critical point, where Earth is rapidly approaching total failure as a planet. Perhaps you have wondered how we humans could have managed to do so much damage in so little time.
There has always been a lot of conflict and contention between religion and science, arguably since the beginning of human abstract thought. Everyone has an opinion on how the two interact, intermingle, or completely repel against each other. The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew is simply one man’s opinion written into a book.
“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)
It is tempting to say that any well-educated person should know what it takes to be scientifically literate. But what does scientific literacy really involve? Given that scientific literacy is a key goal of most science education standards and frameworks, considerable ink has been dedicated to utilizing the term in pedagogical papers.
