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Archive for the tag “Earth”

09 Mar 2020

Why Earth Has Two Levels

From the tip of Mount Everest to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, elevations on Earth span more than 65,000 feet. These elevations are actually super rare and the vast majority of our planet’s surface falls somewhere in the middle.

Earth’s outer shell is made of two materials, whose different densities and thicknesses give rise to the different levels. And if you wanted further proof, draw the Earth’s elevation on a graph and you get two distinct humps–two levels. Here’s more from MinuteEarth.

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13 Jan 2020

Explaining the Moon’s Orbit

Our Sun holds 99.8 percent of all the mass in the solar system and it exerts twice the gravitational pull on the Moon than the Earth does. So why is it that the Moon orbits Earth and not the Sun? Around everything in space is a volume where the gravity of the thing in the middle beats out the gravity from something farther away, even if it is more massive. This phenomenon is called the Hill Sphere, where the Earth’s gravity dominates. Science writer and educator Dr. Joe Hanson explains further in this episode of It’s Okay To Be Smart.

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12 Dec 2019

Why It’s So Hot Underground

Back in the Middle Ages, miners noticed that the deeper they dug into the Earth, the hotter it got. Physicist William Thompson, aka Lord Kelvin of temperature fame, theorized that Earth started out hot and has been cooling ever since. He used the hypothesis to predict the age of our planet, but overshot the number by several million years. What was missing in his theory, was his failure to detect the rigidity of the Earth’s mantle, the layer between the crust and the core. MinuteEarth host Emily Elert explains further.

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08 Nov 2019

Our Weird Solar System

Since the early 1990s, scientists manned with powerful telescopes have discovered close to 3,500 exoplanets and research suggests that every star has at least one planet.  So it appears that our solar system is not that special. Or are we?

It seems that mysteries abound in our solar system and out of thousands of other systems, none look quite like ours. For starters, the size of planets don’t vary in size in one system. From tiny Mercury to monstrous Jupiter, the planets in our system vary wildly.

In addition, other system have at least one Super Earth–an Earthlike planet with slightly more mass. There is no such object in our solar system. So our solar system has left us with an abundance of mysteries. Fortunately, we are starting to get to the bottom of them thanks to computer simulations. SciShow Space host Reid Reimers helps unravel the mystery.

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16 Sep 2019

More Evidence of Planet 9

For more than a century, astronomers have searched the galaxy for a ninth planet, one they refer to as Planet 9, or a super Earth. Recent evidence suggests the planet lies beyond Neptune and is much larger than Earth. Problem is, it’s way out there–about 80 times farther from the Sun than Earth. SciShow Space host Reid Reimers fills in the details.

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25 Aug 2019

Some Days Aren’t 24 Hours

A stellar day is how long it takes the Earth to complete a full rotation about its axis, measured with respect to a distant stationary reference point in space. But our traditional concept of a day has to do with our Sun, not the galactic center. For each turn of the Earth, there’s a time when the Sun is highest, and a day is simply the time it takes for the Sun to get back to that point. A solar day is not the same thing as a day kept by our clocks, since it uses the Sun as a reference point as to when noon is. But the length of time when the Sun is highest isn’t constant, changing up or down by about a minute over the course of a year. So do we really have 24 hours in a day? minutephysics host Henry Reich unravels the mystery.

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17 Aug 2019

The Habitability of Super Earths

When determining the habitability of exoplanets in our universes, scientists have turned their attention to super earths as worlds with the potential to harbor life and civilizations. Super earths, of course, derived their name from their enormous size–up to 10 times the mass of our planet but sharing similar features. “We’re most interested in the earth analogs, ones that have a rocky surface and an atmosphere something like our own planet, just a bit larger,” says author and futurist John Michael Godier. What would those planets be like and how would those differences affect life that might develop on those worlds? Tune in to hear Godier answer those questions.

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02 May 2019

God’s Fingerprint

“Fibonacci numbers are of interest to biologists and physicists because they are frequently observed in various natural objects and phenomena. The branching patterns in trees and leaves, for example, and the distribution of seeds in a raspberry are based on Fibonacci numbers.

A Sanskrit grammarian, Pingala, is credited with the first mention of the sequence of numbers, sometime between the fifth century B.C. and the second or third century A.D. Since Fibonacci introduced the series to Western civilization, it has had a high profile from time to time. Recently, in The Da Vinci Code , for example, the Fibonacci sequence is part of an important clue.”

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In this episode of the Numberphile, Dr. Holly Krieger from Murray Edwards College at the University of Cambridge, outlines the mathematical sequences that under lay Fibonacci numbers.

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And here, SerialBrain2 connects the dots, drawing upon the Fibonacci work in mathematics, physics and biology, to begin to show the intelligent design of galaxies and star systems, as well as some of the nefarious forces here on planet Earth that are intent to hold us back, to block our knowledge and to drive a wedge between mankind and our creator.

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25 Apr 2019

Incredible Journey of Voyager 1

The Voyager 1 spacecraft, launched on September 5, 1977, is the farthest man-made object from Earth at 13.5 billion miles. Among the highlights in its 42-year journey are the mind-blowing close-up photos of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, captured like never before, and magnificent shots of Saturn’s ringlets and two mysterious moons.

In 1990, at a distance of 4 billion miles, scientists pointed the Voyager cameras toward the sun and were rewarded with a “family portrait” of our solar system, capturing Planet Earth as a tiny blue speck in an array of light.  In 2012, Voyager 1, which was built to last only five years, crossed the threshold of interstellar space, still collecting data despite being bombarded daily by dangerous cosmic rays. Tune in as V101 Science features more nuggets from the spacecraft’s incredible journey.

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23 Apr 2019

Humans Evolved Elsewhere

There’s a popularly held theory that organic matter may have been delivered to Earth by meteors as single-celled organisms or simple blocks of life, thus spurring the human race. But research scientist Dr. Ellis Silver has adopted a radical theory, contending that humans arrived as fully formed, complex organisms between 60,000 and 200,000 years ago. Silver lays out the facts in his book, Humans Are Not From Earth, and this episode of WhatCulture divulges seven reasons why we may have come from elsewhere.

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