Texas county issues disaster declaration for solar eclipse, expects 200K people
A North Texas county issued a disaster declaration ahead of the April 8 solar eclipse, warning of traffic and potential gridlock as the celestial event ends.
A North Texas county issued a disaster declaration ahead of the April 8 solar eclipse, warning of traffic and potential gridlock as the celestial event ends.
Space Exploration
Mar 28, 2024
0
353
The last time a total solar eclipse cast its shadows across the United States in August 2017, Jenée Chizick-Agüero, the founder and publisher of Motivos magazine, was pregnant with her son.
Social Sciences
Apr 8, 2024
3
69
"3 Body Problem," Netflix's new big-budget adaptation of Liu Cixin's book series helmed by the creators behind "Game of Thrones," puts the science in science fiction.
General Physics
Mar 27, 2024
1
101
In less than six months, NASA is set to launch Europa Clipper on a 1.6-billion-mile (2.6-billion-kilometer) voyage to Jupiter's ocean moon Europa. From the wild vibrations of the rocket ride to the intense heat and cold of ...
Astronomy
Mar 27, 2024
0
19
Japan's moon lander woke up after unexpectedly surviving a second frigid, two-week lunar night and transmitted new images back to Earth, the country's space agency said Thursday.
Space Exploration
Mar 28, 2024
0
311
Modern physics suggests time may be an illusion. Einstein's theory of relativity, for example, suggests the universe is a static, four-dimensional block that contains all of space and time simultaneously—with no special ...
General Physics
Apr 16, 2024
64
410
In celebration of the 34th anniversary of the launch of NASA's legendary Hubble Space Telescope on April 24, astronomers took a snapshot of the Little Dumbbell Nebula (also known as Messier 76, M76, or NGC 650/651) located ...
Astronomy
Apr 23, 2024
0
36
Ancient Egyptians were known for their religious beliefs and astronomical knowledge of the sun, moon, and planets, but up until now, it has been unclear what role the Milky Way played in Egyptian religion and culture.
Archaeology
Apr 9, 2024
1
354
An international team of astronomers and astrophysicists has confirmed the first known observance of a tidally locked super-Earth exoplanet. In their paper published in The Astrophysical Journal, the group describes the unique ...
The heliosphere—made of solar wind, solar transients, and the interplanetary magnetic field—acts as our solar system's personal shield, protecting the planets from galactic cosmic rays. These extremely energetic particles ...
Astronomy
Mar 29, 2024
6
1007
The Solar System[a] consists of the Sun and those celestial objects bound to it by gravity, all of which formed from the collapse of a giant molecular cloud approximately 4.6 billion years ago. The Sun's retinue of objects circle it in a nearly flat disc called the ecliptic plane, most of the mass of which is contained within eight relatively solitary planets whose orbits are almost circular. The four smaller inner planets; Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars, also called the terrestrial planets, are primarily composed of rock and metal. The four outer planets, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, also called the gas giants, are composed largely of hydrogen and helium and are far more massive than the terrestrials.
The Solar System is also home to two main belts of small bodies. The asteroid belt, which lies between Mars and Jupiter, is similar to the terrestrial planets as it is composed mainly of rock and metal. The Kuiper belt (and its subpopulation, the scattered disc), which lies beyond Neptune's orbit, is composed mostly of ices such as water, ammonia and methane. Within these belts, five individual objects, Ceres, Pluto, Haumea, Makemake and Eris, are recognised to be large enough to have been rounded by their own gravity, and are thus termed dwarf planets. The hypothetical Oort cloud, which acts as the source for long-period comets, may also exist at a distance roughly a thousand times beyond these regions.
Within the Solar System, various populations of small bodies, such as comets, centaurs and interplanetary dust, freely travel between these regions, while the solar wind, a flow of plasma from the Sun, creates a bubble in the interstellar medium known as the heliosphere, which extends out to the edge of the scattered disc.
Six of the planets and three of the dwarf planets are orbited by natural satellites, usually termed "moons" after Earth's Moon. Each of the outer planets is encircled by planetary rings of dust and other particles.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA