Sunday Summary 2 March 2014
This week in the world above our heads
Welcome to Looking Up’s Sunday Summary — a quick recap of what you missed this week in the world above our heads, both on Medium and elsewhere on the web.
On Looking Up
Our biggest story this week was the story of a half-tonne meteor hitting the Moon on 11 September 2013. If you were looking up on that day, you’d have seen a bright flash of light lasting for eight seconds — the result of the largest meteorite that we’ve ever seen crashing into our natural satellite
We also put together a comprehensive guide to everything you’ve ever wanted to know about aurorae. Included is a full history of how we figured out the mechanism behind it, an explanation of where the different colours come from, details on how we classify different aurorae and whether there are aurorae on other planets. Fill your boots.
Want to see 100,000 asteroids spinning through space? Of course you do. So a NASA researcher has put together an animation that shows how our asteroid belt is split into 37 different families, which presumably fight turf wars over the best orbits. Or maybe we’ve just been watching too much TV.
Every so often in discussion of climate change, the role that volcanoes play comes up. Every time they erupt, they temporarily cool the climate by filling the stratosphere with shiny particles, creating beautiful sunsets but destroying harvests. Unfortunately it’s not an effect we can rely on to permanently offset climate change.
The world’s longest aircraft has been unveiled in a hangar in Bedfordshire, UK. The Airlander is the creation of Hybrid Air Vehicles, a British company, and will launch later in the year. No-one mention the Hindenburg.
Finally, the Cloud Index this week took a look at cirrus — the wispy, high-in-the-atmosphere ice clouds that herald bad weather. You can find the full index of clouds we’ve examined so far right here.
Elsewhere on the web
Space junk has been becoming a problem in Earth’s orbit for some time, and various agencies have been trying to work out what to do about it. The European Space Agency’s latest plan, according to Jason Koebler in Motherboard, is to use harpoons, tentacles and giant nets to clean it up. More details will come in early May.
Keeping satellites in synch is a tricky task, handled by the world’s atomic clocks. In the United States, responsibility is tasked on the US Naval Observatory, which has a time services department packed with precise chronometers. The Atlantic has a great video interview with Demetrios Matsakis, the observatory’s chief time scientist.
Between 2000BC and 1990AD, we discovered three planets. This week, we found 715. We’re in a great age of discovery, fuelled by the Kepler Space Telescope — which has been resolutely scanning the skies since it was launched in 2009. The BBC has a nice piece on the announcement, put together by its science correspondent Jonathan Amos.
Here on Medium, Ethan Siegel at Starts With A Bang has a great article on The Night the Universe Changed. Tycho’s supernova laid the foundations for our discovery that stars aren’t constant — they can be born and die. “The most eternal things in all of human experience weren’t eternal, after all,” he says.
Also on Medium, the Physics arXiv Blog has a nice piece on how astronomers are making the case for a mission to Neptune and Uranus. We know precious little about either, with our only knowledge coming from the 1986 and 1989 Voyager 2 flybys on its way out of the solar system. “Uranus and Neptune must be priorities for astrophysicists, if only for reasons of completeness,” writes the anonymous blogger. “Everywhere we’ve visited has thrown up fascinating and unexpected results. There’s no reason to think the ice giants will be any different.”
Finally we’ll call it a week with this astounding gallery of murmurations of starlings, put together by The Atlantic. Lovely stuff.
Looking Up is a collection on Medium that offers a home to those obsessed with the world above our heads. It’s curated by @duncangeere. If you enjoyed this article, please click the “recommend” button below, and if you want more, then click the “follow” button to make sure you don’t miss anything in the future. You can also ‘Like’ the collection on Facebook.
