Space

Another two harmless asteroids being shared in the sensationalist press. I am getting PM's from some really scared people about these. These two asteroids not only are harmless, they never were even considered for the Sentry table. And no they are not planet killers. They are not big enough to do more than have minor global effects like a few months of cooler weather because of dust in the atmosphere. Large enough to have some effects on the yields of our crops for one year. But that is an academic question becaue they can't hit. To debunk: Asteroid warning: Space rock comparable to…

The Juno mission, designed to help scientists better understand Jupiter's origin and evolution, was launched in 2011 to map its gravitational and magnetic fields and probe the planet's deep, internal structure. It's found some mysterious gravitational readings which experts infer mean Jupiter's core is less dense and more extended that expected.  Jupiter began as a dense, rocky or icy planet that later gathered its thick atmosphere from the primordial disk of gas and dust that birthed our sun so what if the recent data could be explained by a giant impact that stirred Jupiter's core,…

https://www.foxnews.com/science/astronomers-spot-moon-flashing-at-us-and-no-one-can-explain-why

Ever since telescopes were first invented, by some dutch lens grinder in the late XVIth century, and then demonstrated to be invaluable tools for investigating the cosmos around us by Galileo Galilei in the early 1600s, there has been a considerable, steady effort to construct bigger and better ones. Particularly bigger ones. The benefits of large aperture -the possibility to bring to focus a wider light front, which increases the telescope's resolving power linearly with the diameter and light gathering with the square of it - were understood quite early-on, but the crafting of large lenses…

As a person of native American descent and quite a bit of native culture I know a thing or two about that world view.  Granted my family is well assimilated and mixed in as many who are descendants of some of the first Native Americans to make contact with the white man.  This gives me a fine-tuned sense of when someone is using nativness for nonsense. This is not to say that Native Hawaiians, Native Americans, or other indigenous people never have a point. The Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) protest was one where they did, and where real practical environmental damage is a legitimate…

At best we can speculate about GJ 357d. The case of GJ 357d we have a scientific paper which is about a planet that is in the habitable zone of its star, is at least six point one times the mass of the Earth, based on what we see, and we do not even know its radius (Luque, et al. 2019).  Yet the news media writes and reports on it as if we knew for certain it is Earth like.   (A brief word on Jessica Yaniv follows.) Without knowing the radius of the planet, we cannot know its density.  Without knowing its density, we cannot know if it is a small gas giant or a large…

Since the first use of electric lamps in the 19th century, society hasn’t looked back. Homes and streets are lit at all hours so that people can go about their business when they’d once have been asleep. Besides the obvious benefits to societies and the economy, there’s growing awareness of the negative impact of artificial light. Light pollution has been blamed for wasting energy, disrupting wildlife behavior and harming mental health. One aspect has avoided the spotlight though. Namely, that light not only allows one to see, but also to be seen. This could well attract unwelcome attention…

The first potentially habitable world outside of our own solar system is only about 31 light-years away and a new paper models the conditions under which the planet GJ 357 d, discovered a few months ago, could sustain life. With a thick atmosphere, the planet GJ 357 d could maintain liquid water on its surface like Earth and that means it could be habitable. It is nearby a diminutive M-type dwarf sun, about one-third the size of our own sun,(it is unclear if the planet transits) which harbors three planets, with GJ 357 in that system's habitable zone. In February,  NASA's Transiting…

The Earth has a magnetic field with north and south poles. The magnetic field of the Earth is surrounded by the magnetosphere that keeps most of the particles from the Sun from hitting the Earth. Some of these particles from the solar wind enter the atmosphere at one million miles per hour. We see them as one of the most beautiful of all natural phenomena -- Earth's polar lights, the Aurora Borealis in the north and the Aurora Australis, near the south pole. The auroras occur when highly charged electrons from the solar wind interact with elements in the Earth's atmosphere and become trapped…

This may help with this and other fake asteroid news. It's a no hazard asteroid. There is no NASA warning at all. They have already removed 88 "no hazard" asteroids from their table so far this year. It’s a 11 million to one against, and it's like rolling 9 or 10 dice and getting a six every time. An object this size hits only every 94,000 years. They search for them so that they can warn us if they are going to hit. With a warning then we can either deflect it or evacuate the impact zone. There is no warning for this one. A real warning would be given by NASA's Center for Near Earth Object…