My Science School

There’s gold (and other precious metals) in those rocks! In fact, a company called Planetary Resources plans to send robot miners to the asteroid belt.

The asteroid belt probably contains millions of asteroids. Astronomers think that the asteroid belt is made up of material that was never able to form into a planet, or of the remains of a planet which broke apart a very long time ago. The asteroids in the asteroid belt come in a variety of sizes. Some are very small (less than a mile across), while others are quite large. The largest asteroid is called Ceres. It is about one-quarter the size of our moon. It is a dwarf planet.

 

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Asteroids are roving rocks found in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

A Meteor also known as shooting stars, meteors are places of rocks or ice that enter the Earth’s atmosphere. As much as 22,000,000 pounds (10,000,000 kg) of meteors burn harmlessly in the atmosphere each day.

Any piece of space debris that survives the fiery entry into Earth’s atmosphere is known as a meteorite once it touches down.

 

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Although movies portray asteroid belts as spaceship-smashing jumbles of rock, our solar system’s real asteroid belt isn’t nearly so treacherous. The average distance between rocks is nearly a million miles (1.6 million km), which would give spaceship pilots plenty of wiggle room.

It’s estimated that our asteroid belt once contained about 1000 times the mass it currently contains. However, within about one million years of its formation, it was down to somewhere in the vicinity of the stabilized amount we see today. Once this system was stabilized with almost no collisions, the asteroids simply travel in their respective orbits with the field itself neither increasing nor decreasing in mass significantly since that initial stabilization period.

 

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Nobody knows, but don’t lose any sleep over the thought of a space rock landing in your living room. Several monitoring projects – such as Spacewatch and the Minor Planet Center – use powerful telescopes to scan the skies and track the courses of any “near-Earth objects,” including asteroids that might drift too close to home. NASA has identified 90 percent of all the near-Earth objects large enough to cause catastrophic damage if they stuck our planet. So far, we’re in the clear.

 

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Because they’ve smashed into every planet in the solar system, including Earth, and one good hit could mean game over for life here. Asteroids travel at tens of thousands of miles an hour – speeds that transfer into destructive energy when they collide with a planet, moon, or each other. An asteroid 450 feet (137 m) across could destroy an entire city. More than a thousand people were injured in 2013 when an asteroid just 62 feet (19 m) wide exploded high in the atmosphere above Chelyabinsk, Russia. An asteroid impact 65 million years ago may have wiped out the dinosaurs.

 

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Stephen Hawking is famous for shedding light on black holes in 1960s through today in England. Considered the most brilliant scientific mind since Einstein, Stephen Hawking is famous for trying to reverse engineer the workings of the universe through quantum physics – or the study of the universe at its teeniest-weeniest level. He’s also an expert on black holes and their bizarre behavior. Based on his observations, Hawking believes that just as the universe began in a cosmic big bang; it will someday end up collapsing into black holes.

 

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Because space is big. The galaxy might be teeming with life, but the gulfs between stars make visiting our neighbors an impossible mission – at least for now. Remember, it would take thousands of years to travel to the closest star outside our solar system using modern spaceship technology.

As previously mentioned, space is big, so there are tons of regions to listen for alien signals. If we're not listening precisely in the direction from which a signal is originating, we'd never hear it.

Radio technology may be commonplace here on Earth, but on far-flung worlds, alien societies may have graduated to more advanced communication technologies, like neutrino signals. We can't decipher those just yet.

 

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After analyzing the known exoplanets and comparing that data with what they know about the Milky Way, astronomers at Cornell University predict that as many as 100 million worlds in our galaxy could support complex life.

There are many methods of detecting exoplanets. Transit photometry and Doppler spectroscopy have found the most, but these methods suffer from a clear observational bias favoring the detection of planets near the star; thus, 85% of the exoplanets detected are inside the tidal locking zone. In several cases, multiple planets have been observed around a star. About 1 in 5 Sun-like stars have an "Earth-sized" planet in the habitable zone.

 

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Astronauts not only have to deal with gravity in space, but they also use it to get where they’re going. Traveling from A to B in a spaceship or probe requires complex calculations – literally, rocket science – to ‘’slingshot’’ from planet to planet (or moon) across the solar system using the gravity of each heavenly body.

Without the effect of gravity, blood and other body fluids begin to flow towards the head. This can cause a feeling of stuffiness and headaches. With no gravity to push against, bones and muscles can become weak. To stay fit, they have to exercise several hours each day. This allows them to recover more quickly when they return to Earth.

 In a shuttle or space station, there is no up or down. There is no difference between a floor and a ceiling. This can make astronauts feel sick until they get used to this strange arrangement.

 

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Albert Einstein is famous for the theory of relativity in 1905-1916 in Germany. Although this wild-haired physicist didn’t study the cosmos through a telescope (his tool of choice was mathematics). Einstein laid the foundation for modern physics and our understanding of the relationship between time and space. His observations led him to believe that the laws of physics – and the speed of light – stay the same no matter your location and motion in the universe. He also explained that space and time are not two separate things. They’re tied to each other in a concept he called space-time. What’s more, Einstein discovered that space and time become distorted (or curved) by strong gravitational fields, such as those given off by large stars or black holes. This, Einstein theorized, can lead to all sorts of wild effects, including time travel.

 

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It would be a one-way trip. The ship would sink deeper into clouds of ammonia of water vapor until the intense atmospheric pressure and heat compressed the hydrogen around it into molten liquid. Science-fiction writers have proposed exploring the gas giants in hot-air balloons high above the crushing depths below.

Gas giants may have a rocky or metallic core—in fact, such a core is thought to be required for a gas giant to form—but the majority of its mass is in the form of the gases hydrogen and helium, with traces of water, methane, ammonia, and other hydrogen compounds.

Unlike rocky planets, which have a clearly defined difference between atmosphere and surface, gas giants do not have a well-defined surface; their atmospheres simply become gradually denser toward the core, perhaps with liquid or liquid-like states in between.

 

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Large ammonia crystals that form in this ice giant’s upper atmosphere cause electrical storms the size of the United States and lightning strikes a thousand times more powerful than those on Earth.

Saturn's flicking polar lights dance higher above the planet – 750 miles (1,200 km) – than any known aurora in the solar system. Auroras appear mostly in the high latitudes near a planet's magnetic poles. When charged particles from the magnetosphere – the magnetic bubble surrounding a planet – plunge into the planet's upper atmosphere, they cause the atmosphere to glow. The curtain shapes show the paths that these charged particles take as they flow along the lines of the magnetic field between the magnetosphere and the uppermost part of the atmosphere.

 

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Even if leprechauns were real – and they really did bury their booty at each rainbow’s end – you’d never find their treasure. Rainbows aren’t fixed a spot in the sky; they’re optical illusions. If you moved toward a rainbow, the angle of the light through the raindrops would shift and the rainbow would stay the same distance from you. So, if leprechauns really are real, they certainly picked the best spot to hide their gold.

Leprechauns play a massive part in the pot of gold legend, and there’s another story that involves them even more than the fairies one. An alternative belief is that the Vikings came to Ireland, looting, and plundering, and left some of their treasure behind when they left, which the leprechauns found. Distrusting all humans, leprechauns decided to bury their loot at the end of the rainbow so it would be almost impossible for humans to find. And so the legend was born, and this is one of the things that have made leprechauns so iconic.

 

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If would take a full year of a ship to skim the microplastics from just one percent of the Garbage Patch. And there’s more garbage where that come from. Similar trash vortices swirl near Japan and in the North Atlantic. But it’s never too late to cut down on our use of plastic.

Marine scientists and plastic pollution experts who have criticized the project are also interested in reducing plastic pollution in the ocean. But they argue that by focusing on a relatively expensive, hard-to-pull off technological innovation, the Cleanup may take attention away from necessary efforts to stop plastic from getting into the water in the first place.

 

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It is for the locals. Sea turtles, fish, and marine mammals choke on the larger pieces. Scientists fear that the plastic will block sunlight from reaching plankton, tiny organisms that form the basis of the ocean’s food chain. If plankton populations plummet, the entire marine ecosystem will suffer.

Over a few decades, humans have managed to dump tons upon tons of garbage into the ocean. Of the most devastating elements of this pollution is that plastics takes thousands of years to decay. As a result, fish and wildlife are becoming intoxicated. Consequently the toxins from the plastics have entered the food chain, threatening human health. In the most polluted places in the ocean, the mass of plastic exceeds the amount of plankton six times over. This is a large piece of evidence that leaves the problem of polluted oceans undeniable. It is upsetting that more of clean up effort is not taking place.

 

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