Space

ʻOumuamua is the first ever interstellar body that was observed while it passed through our solar system, which makes it a really cool object. Hundreds of thousands of asteroids and comets have been observed, but all of them originated from within our own solar system. It was known that…

Not that I am going to try, but it is difficult to underestimate the importance of the first detection of gravitational waves for physics. Apart from the fact that it is another gloriously successful test for general relativity, it actually opens up a new observational window on the universe…

This image is the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field (XDF). It was created by combining many images taken between 2002 and 2012 by the Hubble Space Telescope. The total exposure time was 22.5 days (almost 2 million seconds), and the image contains…

If you have ever seen a fireball, which is an unusually bright meteor (or shooting star), then you know that they can be very impressive. But did you also know that reporting your observation can help to further science? Fireballs, and meteors in general, are like…

After mentioning Rosetta in June, there is another deep space mission that I want to bring to your attention. The final preparations for the flyby of Pluto by the New Horizons spacecraft have started. New Horizons will be…

The famous “Wow!” signal is a radio signal that was received on 15 August 1977 as part of the SETI program. After all these years, it is still the most tantalizing candidate for being a true interstellar signal. Its name comes from the manually written word “Wow!” on…

There’s a truly cool deep space mission that I need to bring to your attention: Rosetta. Visit ESA’s Rosetta page for details. Rosetta is an ESA (European Space Agency) mission. It will be the first spacecraft that…

It turns out that the balls in two popular sports, basketball and tennis, are almost exactly the right size for an Earth-Moon system scale model. Take a standard NBA basketball, which has a circumference of 29.5 in (74.9 cm). The diameter of the basketball is then 9.39 in (23.85 cm). If we let this ball represent the Earth…

The illustration shows the Earth-Moon system to scale, with the same scale used for size and distance. The diameter of the Earth is 12742 km, while the diameter of the Moon is 3475 km. So, to draw the Earth-Moon system to scale on a screen, each…

Quite a while ago, I briefly reported on the spectacular Mars Science Laboratory mission that is currently under way. As you are probably aware, the Curiosity rover has now safely landed, and is already exploring the Red Planet. In this article, I want to tell you about the spectacular way in which the rover was put down on the surface. For previous Mars rovers like…