I have a friend who teaches a grade six class. Yesterday she began explaining how the moonlight is really just light reflected from the sun, when the whole class erupted into a volcano of curiosity. She couldn’t keep up with all the great questions they were asking, and had them write them all down. She [...]
The brightest star that we can see in the night sky has been named Sirius, an ancient Greek word for “glowing”. It’s one of the closest stars to earth, about 8.5 light years away, and we can look forward to it getting brighter for the next 60,000 years as it inches ever closer to us. [...]
I was talking with an amateur astronomer this morning who, in reference to another astronomer and blogger I mentioned, said “He’s great… except that he believes in black holes.” The comment caught me off guard. Up until that moment I had no idea that “black holes” was a topic of controversy. I dug into research [...]
There is a lot of hub-bub about a neutrino that was witnessed moving faster than the speed of light, a feat which was deemed impossible by Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity. The science community is working overtime to figure out if the experiment can be repeated and confirmed, as it would have a major impact [...]
I’ve already made my case for being skeptical towards global warming and climate change hysteria. The single biggest influence on the earth’s climate is the sun. It’s a burning ball of gas that is bigger than a million earths, and counts for 99.8% of all matter in our solar system. It’s kind of a big [...]
Yesterday I was talking about the hypersphere as one of the proposed shapes for the universe, but I ran out of space (trying to keep things snappy) before I got to the more interesting idea. Some theories peg the universe as having no shape at all… it just goes on forever. Have you ever heard [...]
I will begin with the only hard fact I have on this topic: Nobody knows the structure or form of the universe. It’s debatable whether or not we will ever be able to know with any certainty. Still, the scientific process marches on. We observe the available evidence, and make intelligent guesses. One fundamental question [...]