Category: Science
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Are comets and shooting stars the same?
Caption: Perseid Meteor from UK 12-13 Aug 2021 (credit in ALT) I was asked this question during a recent talk on stargazing. Easy question to answer, was my first thought. I started with confirming that they were indeed different phenomena and went on to discuss where comets came from, their usual long orbits (unless they…
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“The amazing thing is that every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand.”
– Lawrence Krauss: “A Universe from Nothing” “… It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements – the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution – weren’t created at the beginning of time.”…
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“I don’t think the human race will survive the next thousand years unless we spread into space. There are too many accidents that can befall life on a single planet. But I’m an optimist. We will reach out to the stars.”
– Stephen Hawking (8 January 1942 – 14 March 2018) An extract from an interview by Roger Highfield in Daily Telegraph (16 October 2001) where Hawking says, “Colonies in space may be our only hope.” There are certainly a lot of accidents that could befall humanity – and not just the ones we think we…
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NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) images
For a change of pace, here are several of, the now famous images, taken by the JWST, since its launch on 25 December 2021 at 12:20 pm GMT. JWST took off from the Guiana Space Centre, also called Europe’s Spaceport, a European spaceport to the northwest of Kourou in French Guiana, a region of France in…
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If stargazing is for everyone, how do I start?
… at the beginning. Stargazing is a gateway to astronomy and astronomy is one of the few sciences that remains open to the amateur or citizen scientist – where real science can be conducted. For example, BOSS (more accurately, Backyard Observatory Supernova Search) are an amateur collaboration of 6 friends from Australia and New Zealand…
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“The most remarkable discovery in all of astronomy is that the stars are made of atoms of the same kind as those on the earth.”
– Richard P. Feynman (11 May 1918 – 15 Feb 1988) What is there to say about Richard Feynman, American theoretical physicist who was probably the most brilliant, influential, and iconoclastic figure in his field. His lifelong interest was in subatomic physics. In 1965, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in…
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“When we look out into space, we are looking into our own origins, because we are truly children of the stars.”
– Professor Brian Cox, Wonders of the Universe, BBC Why are we here? Where do we come from? These are the most enduring of questions. And it’s an essential part of human nature to want to find the answers. We can trace our ancestry back hundreds of thousands of years to the dawn of humankind.…
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“Shoot for the stars but if you happen to miss, shoot for the moon instead.”
– Neil A Armstrong (5 August 1930 – 25 August 2012) The first human to stand on the Moon! What a guy! With Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins in lunar orbit, the first two human beings to stand somewhere that isn’t the Earth. Did he say the above quote? Whether he did or didn’t what does…
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Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9
Discussing originality and plagiarism, Matthew Syed uses the release of two very similar movies in 1998, Armageddon and Deep Impact, as an example of how our brains are wired for unoriginality. He finds, in his Radio 4 series Sideways (available as a podcast), that we evolve as a collective brain, absorbing our shared cultural cues and looking…
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“Because they are so long-lived, atoms really get around. Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you.”
― Bill Bryson, A Really Short History of Nearly Everything The rest of the paragraph from his book is really awesome and inspiring, it goes: “We are each so atomically numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms—up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested—probably…
Stargazing Guy 