In this year of darkness, today brings something to celebrate. Winter solstice is the shortest day of the year, which means the light will finally start returning. And this year, the first day of winter also marks a special celestial event — the Jupiter-Saturn Great Conjunction. Imagine that our solar system is a racetrack, and […]
Astronomy
I was pretty sure the sky was flat, like a cap or a lid or a ceiling. I didn’t think about the sun going up, around, and down; or the moon changing shape; or the constellations moving to different neighborhoods. I was curious about other things, not the sky. The first time I thought about […]
Space is this abstract concept to lots of you. I know so many people, including so many writers, who could not care less about the subject. They are bored, at best, by everything that exists beyond the eggshell-thin layer of this planet’s atmosphere. The wild, kaleidoscopic kingdom of life on this world is enough for […]
Last winter I was staying with friends who have a dark sky. (I don’t have a dark sky and even on clear nights I can hardly see Orion, which makes me sad but I’m used to it.) It was New Year’s Eve and as usual I bugged out early, went up to the guestroom, adjusted […]
For a brief period of my life, the Hubble Space Telescope would shoot me an email with a link about once every two weeks. Then I would click and wait. Then hundreds of thousands of stars would spill across my monitor, lighting up cells in my eyes with photons from a screen from a file […]
Cosmology is timeless, perhaps literally—as this post argued on January 23, 2015. In the 1992 documentary A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking describes what we would see if we were observing an astronaut nearing a black hole’s event horizon—the barrier beyond which gravitation is so great that not even light can escape. He invites […]
On October 25, 2010, LWON welcomed a new occasional feature, “Ask Mr. Cosmology,” which invites readers to contribute to a mailbag full of questions about…The Wonders of the Universe! This entry comes from March 26, 2012. Q: Can neutrinos travel faster than light? Mr. Cosmology: Depends what you mean by “light.” Light, as in light rail? Yes. Light, […]
“There is an aspect to this story that is weirder than you can imagine.” That sentence was e-mailed to me by a geologist, Jan Kramers, at the University of Johannesburg in the waning days of 2017. I had e-mailed him about a paper of his in Geochimica et Cosmochmica Acta. The title of the paper […]