Totally! My favorite astronomical “wow” with my daughter was when she was 12. She wanted to learn about photography, so I set up a tripod at dusk to teach her about aperture, shutter speed, and motion blur. We also compared shots with a remote shutter so she could see how the slightest camera shake during a long exposure would result in a blurry shot.
We were about to go inside once the stars came out, but instead I thought it would be fun to show her how they looked with a two second exposure. “Wait, why do they look like little commas? Are they moving?” I didn’t say a word. I just looked at her, and then it hit…
😳”No! We’re moving!”🤯
Facts aren’t nearly as interesting without the connection of self-discovery.
She came really close to another mind-blowing fact: if you’re talking about linear motion, there’s no difference at all between “they’re moving” and “we’re moving”. Too bad the apparent motion of the stars is caused by rotation, otherwise it would have been a great lesson to introduce basic relativity concepts.
She understood the curved lines as illustrating the rotation of the Earth. We didn’t get into motion away from the universal center.
She’s much older now. Tyson’s version of Cosmos came out in her teens, so we watched all of those and then went back for the OG Sagan episodes. She’s my favorite nerd.
Since October 2023, the rover has been exploring a region of Mars rich with sulfates, a kind of salt that contains sulfur and forms as water evaporates. But where past detections have been of sulfur-based minerals — in other words, a mix of sulfur and other materials — the rock Curiosity recently cracked open is made of elemental, or pure, sulfur. It isn’t clear what relationship, if any, the elemental sulfur has to other sulfur-based minerals in the area.
Intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs) are a long-sought ‘missing link’ in black hole evolution. Only a few other IMBH candidates have been found to date. Most known black holes are either extremely massive, like the supermassive black holes that lie at the cores of large galaxies, or relatively lightweight, with a mass less than 100 times that of the Sun. Black holes are one of the most extreme environments humans are aware of, and so they are a testing ground for the laws of physics and our understanding of how the Universe works. If IMBHs exist, how common are they? Does a supermassive black hole grow from an IMBH? How do IMBHs themselves form? Are dense star clusters their favoured home?
If the distribution of those nine satellite galaxies across the entire Milky Way is similar to what was found in the footprint captured by the HSC-SSP, the research team calculates that there actually may be closer to 500 satellite galaxies
WTF? I was thinking there were around a dozen or so.
Ethan Seigel never does "clickbait’ articles. He does 100% educational articles. I actually didn’t know more than half of these things. Who the hell knew that Earth does not have the most water in the solar system?
Higher speed impacts penetrate deep, but also cause the rock to melt. This fills in deeper craters, limiting the max depth a crater can be. There are still very deep huge craters, but these look more like big depressions than craters, because of how big they are. They are also themselves covered with craters usually, making their size and shape harder to see.
Because the diameter of the moon is 3474km, a difference of several kilometers would only amount to a fraction of a percent. So even though one crater is for example 10km deeper than another, relative to the size of the moon this is practically nothing. When viewing pics like these where the whole moon is visible, this matters.
The moon is a very uniform gray color and lacks the indicators our brain use to gauge depth. This makes it very hard to guess how deep the different craters are. You can see some craters have more shadows where others don’t, but they are also different shapes and sizes and the lighting is different so it’s hard to see.
There is also probably some part of the speeds of incoming stuff being within a certain range and the moonrocks being relatively uniform in materials, so the range of craters than can exists is probably limited. But I’m not certain how big of an factor this is and what the range is.
There are plenty of missions right now. China has landed a rover on the moon this month. And multiple countries have satellites in orbit around the moon. Nasa has their Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter which takes very high resolution images of the moon all the time and these are publiced on their website.
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