Tag Archives: pluto

Welcome to the Universe – Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michael A. Strauss & J. Richard Gott

by Myrna Posted on September 18, 2016

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

Welcome to the Universe

An Astrophysical Tour

Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michael A. Strauss & J. Richard Gott

Genre: Physics

Price: $23.99

Publish Date: September 12, 2016

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Seller: Princeton University Press


Welcome to the Universe is a personal guided tour of the cosmos by three of today’s leading astrophysicists. Inspired by the enormously popular introductory astronomy course that Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michael A. Strauss, and J. Richard Gott taught together at Princeton, this book covers it all—from planets, stars, and galaxies to black holes, wormholes, and time travel. Describing the latest discoveries in astrophysics, the informative and entertaining narrative propels you from our home solar system to the outermost frontiers of space. How do stars live and die? Why did Pluto lose its planetary status? What are the prospects of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe? How did the universe begin? Why is it expanding and why is its expansion accelerating? Is our universe alone or part of an infinite multiverse? Answering these and many other questions, the authors open your eyes to the wonders of the cosmos, sharing their knowledge of how the universe works. Breathtaking in scope and stunningly illustrated throughout, Welcome to the Universe is for those who hunger for insights into our evolving universe that only world-class astrophysicists can provide.

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Welcome to the Universe – Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michael A. Strauss & J. Richard Gott

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Scientists Discover "Most Planet-y" Planet in the Solar System

by AlejandMacfarla Posted on January 20, 2016

Mother Jones

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Oh FFS. We just demoted Pluto because it was too small and didn’t do a real planet’s job of taking out the orbital trash, but now the boffins at Caltech are claiming we have a ninth planet after all. It’s a gazillion miles away, but apparently it’s big enough to “clear the neighborhood” and thus qualify as a real planet.

If it’s real, that is. So far its existence has merely been inferred from gravitational anomalies in Kuiper Belt objects:

The object, which the researchers have nicknamed Planet Nine ed note: clever!, has a mass about 10 times that of Earth and orbits about 20 times farther from the sun on average than does Neptune….”This would be a real ninth planet,” says Mike Brown, the Richard and Barbara Rosenberg Professor of Planetary Astronomy….Brown notes that the putative ninth planet—at 5,000 times the mass of Pluto—is sufficiently large that there should be no debate about whether it is a true planet….In fact, it dominates a region larger than any of the other known planets—a fact that Brown says makes it “the most planet-y of the planets in the whole solar system.“

Ooh. The “most planet-y” object in the solar system! And how do they infer its existence? With sciencey stuff like this:

Well, I’ll believe it when I see it. Or, rather, when I see a digitally enhanced CCD image that’s been fed into the maw of a supercomputer, thus allowing scientists to assure me at a 5-sigma level that a certain gray pixel has met rigorous statistical tests and really is Planet Nine. After all, seeing is believing.

By the way, if we ever mount an expedition to Planet Nine, it should be pretty interesting. Here’s what I expect we’ll find:

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Scientists Discover "Most Planet-y" Planet in the Solar System

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This Map Shows What Each State Googled More Than Any Other in 2015

by MckinleyMcGovern Posted on December 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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Estately Blog

As 2015 winds down, the folks at real estate blog Estately have figured out which celebrities, news stories, and other topics of interest most captivated people across the United States this year. Using data from Google Trends, they identified the term each state Googled more than any other state over the course of the year. (They did the same thing in 2014—check out the map below to see how we’ve progressed, and see here for the full 2015 analysis.)

People in Wisconsin are evidently feeling a bit behind the times, wondering, “What does ‘bae’ mean?” (2015) and “What is Tinder?” (2014). Utah, caught with an embarrassing search history last year, wanted to learn more about transgender issues this year. And it’s not clear what’s going on in New Mexico, where people searched for “Pluto” in 2015 and “zombies” in 2014. See how your state compares with the rest, and happy Googling in 2016. (h/t The Daily Dot)

Estately Blog

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This Map Shows What Each State Googled More Than Any Other in 2015

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