Tag: astronomy

Leap year

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
February 29, 2000
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This week saw, not just a once-in-a-lifetime event, but a once-in-four-centuries event: the first February 29 to fall in a year ending in 00 since 1600. The three basic elements of the calendar are the day, month and year. The day is the time it takes the Earth to rotate once: 24 hours. The month …

A new solar system

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
April 20, 1999
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The idea that planets orbit most of the stars in the universe has such a firm hold on our imagination, thanks to Star Trek and Star Wars, that most people are surprised to hear we only found the first planet outside our solar system in 1995. Only this past week have we confirmed the existence …

Black holes

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
December 7, 1998
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They were talking about black holes recently at the 189th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Toronto. New evidence of their existence was presented, along with evidence of black holes at the centers of three typical galaxies. This may prompt you to ask the question, “So what’s a black hole, and why should I …

SETI @ Home

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
December 7, 1998
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Alas for the good old days, when we thought the Earth was the center of the universe. Today we know our sun is only a very average star in a very average galaxy, in a universe where there are 50 billion galaxies, containing half a trillion stars each, around which, based on recent observations, planets …

Life on other planets

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
December 7, 1998
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On the television program The X-Files, FBI agent Fox Mulder is always searching for proof of extraterrestrials, mostly by exploring old warehouses with his trusty flashlight and cell phone. But as an article by Ron Cowen in the November 1 issue of Science News points out, the real search for non-terrestrial life is taking place in university and …

Asteroids

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
March 2, 1998
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Most of the time, they’re harmless. Innocuous, really. They tumble along, minding their own business, not hurting anybody. But every once in a while–BOOM! “They” are asteroids, and when they go boom, it’s because they’ve run into something. When that something is Earth…well, you’ve got trouble with a capital T, and that rhymes with E, …

The Hubble Space Telescope

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
February 17, 1997
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If you’re an astronomer, “Twinkle, twinkle little star” isn’t a cute bed-time song for children, it’s a nightly nightmare. Stars twinkle (and daytime skies are blue) because we live at the bottom of a thick soup of atmosphere that distorts our view of the heavens. Ever since Galileo, this has played havoc with observations of …

Galileo

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
February 7, 1994
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One scientific anniversary stands out above all others this month: February 15, the 430th birthday of Galileo Galilei. Born near Pisa, Italy, in 1564, Galileo entered the University of Pisa as a medical student, but found that mathematics interested him more. Though he never got a degree, he was made professor of mathematics at his …

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
July 22, 1992
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This may shock some people, but the concept of life on other planets predates Steven Spielberg’s movie E.T. It also predates Kenneth Arnold’s coining of the term “flying saucer” in 1947 and even H. G. Wells’s late-19th-century novel War of the Worlds. Percival Lowell, in the mid-19th century, claimed to see canals on Mars. Immanuel …

Stars

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
April 29, 1992
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Twinkle, twinkle, little star, How I wonder what you are . . . Stars have always fascinated humans. At the dawn of history, and probably even before, wise men watched the stars and learned to read them as markers of the turning of the seasons. They attributed magical powers to the stars (a belief …

The mystery of the missing mass

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
February 5, 1992
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The Mystery of the Missing Mass is not, as you might first suppose, the title of an Agatha Christie novel about a church service that failed to occur on schedule. It is, rather, one of the hottest (or coldest, depending on which theory you subscribe to– never mind, I’ll explain later) issues in the study …

Telescopes

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
March 27, 1991
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People have been gazing at the stars for as long as there have been people. The Babylonians and other ancient civilizations had sophisticated observatories from which they plotted the movements of the stars and planets. However, just looking at the stars and planets with the naked eye will never tell you much about them–they’re only …