AT THE ENTRANCE to my lab’s clean room, I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror: I look like a clown. I’m drowning in a disposable coverall that hangs off of me in droopy folds, and my size 7½ feet are swallowed up by the smallest rubber boots the lab had on hand—a men’s size 12. The thick mass of curls framing my face only accentuates the caricature.
Tag Archives: Astronomy
Astronomers confirm the most distant object in the Solar System
The most distant Solar System object, Farout, has lost its crown after just two years. As Inverse reports, astronomers have confirmed that the planetoid Farfarout is now the farthest known Solar System object. It’s currently 132AU, or about 12.3 billion miles from the Sun (Farout is ‘just’ 120AU away), and its elongated orbit will take it 175AU away. For context, Pluto is 34AU from our host star — Farfarout reaches over five times that distance, and takes about 1,000 years to complete an orbit.
HARVARD PROFESSOR SAYS ALIEN OBJECT VISITED US IN 2017—AND MORE ARE COMING
In his upcoming book published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth, Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb makes a provocative assertion: The mysterious “cigar-shaped object” that NASA dubbed “1I/2017 U1 ‘Oumuamua” was junk from an alien civilization.
The Universe Is Expanding Faster Than Expected
A Car-Sized Asteroid Just Got Remarkably Close to Hitting Earth
On August 16, a car-sized asteroid came to within 1,830 miles (2,950 kilometers) of our planet, making it the closest known non-impacting asteroid on record. Continue reading A Car-Sized Asteroid Just Got Remarkably Close to Hitting Earth
Astronomers find the first known regular pattern of fast radio bursts
Astronomers are having an easier time finding fast radio bursts as of late, and that now includes the first regular pattern for those bursts. A research team from MIT and elsewhere has discovered that something 500 million light-years away is routinely producing four days of seemingly random but frantic bursts, followed by 12 days of silence — something that happened consistently for 500 days of study. Continue reading Astronomers find the first known regular pattern of fast radio bursts
Astronomers Discover the Closest Known Black Hole
The pair of stars in a system called HR 6819 is so close to us that on a clear night in the Southern Hemisphere, a person might be able to spot them without a telescope. What that stargazer wouldn’t see, though, is the black hole hiding right there in the constellation Telescopium. At just 1,000 light-years away, it is the closest black hole to Earth ever discovered, and it could help scientists find the rest of the Milky Way’s missing black holes. Continue reading Astronomers Discover the Closest Known Black Hole
The Fat Cat Collective 