Cosmos
Category archives for Cosmos
About those gravitational waves they just discovered
Posted by Greg Laden on February 11, 2016 
First, what is a gravitational wave? I find it interesting that some people are expressing difficulty in understanding what a gravitational wave is, as though everybody (who is not a physicist) has a perfectly good understanding of what any kind of wave is. We don’t need to go too deeply beneath the surface, as it…
Happy Anniversary Exoplanets
Posted by Greg Laden on November 19, 2015 
This month is the twentieth anniversary of the discovery of exoplanets, which are really just planets that are not in our solar system. (Frankly, I dislike the term exoplanet. It is so solarcentric.) When you think about it, the discovery of planets outside our solar system (we need a word for that) is a special…
Why did Skylab die?
Posted by Greg Laden on August 29, 2015 
Skylab came up in conversation the other day. And then I ran into Amy Shira Teitel’s video. So, naturally, a quick blog post. Skylab was brought down, ultimately, by interaction with the upper reaches of the atmosphere, which was in turn made more likely by solar activity. But, both the nature and extent of solar…
Why is Pluto not a planet?
Posted by Greg Laden on July 13, 2015 
Short answer: Pluto has only two of the three necessary characteristics to be called a planet. Pluto has not cleared its neighborhood, or orbit. But, of course, there are additional details. The simplest reason that Pluto is not a planet is that planet experts say so, and this is their job. But you may be…
What Humans Really Look Like To Aliens
Posted by Greg Laden on April 25, 2015 
Remember the last Olympics, during the parade, where instead of seeing the athletes march along grouped by country, we saw unidentifiable people who were all either taking selfies or grabbing videos of everything going on around them, but we couldn’t tell who they were because their cell phones were totally covering their faces? These days…
The Challenge of Space Flight
Posted by Greg Laden on January 28, 2015 
Suddenly and for the first time I saw Amanda as a little child wide eyed with both awe and fear, among other children some sitting on the floor, some in chairs, some standing behind desks, eyes trained on a TV monitor and their teacher as the sudden realization dawned on all of them that the…
That Orion Thing Is Great!
Posted by Greg Laden on December 5, 2014 
Watch the Orion test flight: Splashdown: Why is it great? Well, speaking as a Gemini (not my horoscope sign, but the space program going when I first gained sentience) … First, it is big, fast, cool looking. It actually looks like a rocket that might have been designed a decade before they ever actually made…
The Comet. It Sings!
Posted by Greg Laden on November 12, 2014 
Have you heard the comet singing? From the Rosetta Blog this press release: Rosetta’s Plasma Consortium (RPC) has uncovered a mysterious ‘song’ that Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko is singing into space. RPC principal investigator Karl-Heinz Glaßmeier, head of Space Physics and Space Sensorics at the Technische Universität Braunschweig, Germany, tells us more. Sound_comet2 Artist’s impression of the…
Philae and Philae: Separated at birth?
Posted by Greg Laden on November 12, 2014 
Just so you know, Philae is a lander planning to land on a comet at this moment being landed on by an Earthling Spacecraft, and it is also an island in the Nile. Before the Rosetta space craft got close, we had no idea what the comet looked like. Now we do. And it looks…
Don’t forget to look up tonight!
Posted by Greg Laden on September 12, 2014 
Auroras are amazing sites because they are, of course, impossible. When Amanda and I got married a year or so ago in northern Minnesota, there was an amazing Aurora, surpassing what anyone at the wedding had ever seen in the state. Big colored curtains of light. Tonight, and over the weekend, the northern lights will…