system

"Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first." -Mark Twain So, you've been around a while, seen all sorts of things, and learned an awful lot about the world, solar system and Universe that we live in. But how well do you know it, really? Image credit: NASA / Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. To scale and in order, these are the eight planets you know so well. There are the four rocky worlds of our inner solar system: Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars, and the four gas giants that dominate the outer solar system: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and…

"Some prophecies are self-fulfilling But I've had to work for all of mine Better times will come to me, God willing Cause I can't leave this world behind" -Josh Ritter You sure can't leave this world behind. At least, not very easily. The reason for it, of course, is gravity. Image Credit: Physclips, via the University of New South Wales' School of Physics. Here on the surface of the Earth, the gravitational potential well is pretty large; large enough that there's no easy way off. Sure, you can pour a huge amount of energy into a rocket to try and overcome this gravitational potential…

No, really, I can hang with the big boys! Although this is usually something we hear from people who are seemingly out of their league, due to diminutive stature, here on Earth: (Muggsy Bogues is awesome.) Apparently, there are stars out there that have the same Napoleon Complex. According to this Press Release, a star only 1% as bright as the Sun just released a burst of energy as powerful as 1000 solar flares! Now, that link is only too happy to provide you with an artist's rendition of what happened: But let's compare this with real stuff, instead. Our Sun has a magnetic field that's…

Can you believe that I had a fight today with someone who's been dead for over 350 years, and I'm losing? -- Ethan, yesterday Of course you can believe it, when the man I'm fighting with is Johannes Kepler. I don't get a chance to tell you about my research very often, mostly because it's still a work in progress. But my latest paper was just submitted and is now out of the way, and so I'd like to tell you what I'm working on at the moment. Well, there we are in the galaxy. We look up at the night sky, and we see our planets as well as all the stars that surround us. But you know what we don…

Yesterday, my good friend (and SWAB reader) Brian wrote a great comment about the practical reasons to explore space, where he talked about the overall economic impact that Space Exploration has had on the economy, as well as the impact it has had on our knowledge and understanding of the Earth, its environment, and how to manage/mitigate the threats to it. And that's wonderful for exploring our Solar System and others. But what do I do in the meantime? After all, this isn't what I study or explore. So I asked this: The practical arguments as to why exploration of space is worthwhile…