The Double Seasons of Kelt-9b
An exoplanet with a hellish climate experiences two summers a year — a year only 35 hours and 32 minutes long — because of the polar orbit it travels around an oblate star
In the 6th chapter of The Assayer, published in 1623, Galileo notes:
Philosophy [i.e. natural philosophy] is written in this grand book — I mean the Universe — which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one is wandering around in a dark labyrinth.
With the revolutionary spirit that characterizes his thinking, Galileo explains in a few words that the laws that govern the functioning of the Universe are mathematical. If we do not understand that physical phenomena speak to us in the language of mathematics, they will remain incomprehensible. The researcher will seem to be uselessly wandering around in a dark labyrinth with no way out.
