Don’t you know you’re never supposed to ask a lady her weight? I can probably get away with telling her mass, though, which is about 4.87×1024 kilograms (Or to write it in tonnes: 4870 million million million tonnes). That means that Venus has about 82% of the Earth’s mass. Of course, mass and weight are two totally different things (even though the units we normally use for them happen to match up on the surface of the Earth). Like all … Continue reading →
Mercury doesn’t weigh anything at all – it’s in a state of freefall around the Sun (which we more commonly call ‘Orbiting’), so that it’s as weightless as an astronaut orbiting the Earth. It’s mass, however is 3.3 x 1023 kg (or three hundred and thirty million trillion tonnes!) – that’s a number so big that even economists can’t understand it, and yet it’s still the smallest planet in the Solar System by a long way. Written by Allen Versfeld Comments? … Continue reading →
A TLP (Transient Lunar Phenomenon) is an unpredictable, rare, mysterious glowing light on the Moon. The ‘Transient’ part of their name means that they’re very rare, and only show up for a very short time. They’ve been seen since astronomers first pointed their telescopes at the Moon, but are so elusive that in hundreds of years they’ve only been photographed a handful of times. They are a bit of a mystery, but one leading theory suggests that they are the … Continue reading →
Space junk is any manmade object orbiting Earth that nobody owns, or that nobody controls. It’s litter, basically, and consists of everything from used-up rocket boosters and dead satellites, to nuts and bolts dropped by careless astronauts. Even though space is very big, it’s still becoming enough of a problem that the International Space Station has had to dodge many objects since it was first built, and at least one privately owned communication satellite has been destroyed in a collision … Continue reading →
An exoplanet is a planet which is not a part of our Solar System. Although nobody knew for sure if they even existed 20 years ago, they are now being discovered at an incredible speed – more than one every single day. Because even the nearest stars are so far away, they are incredibly hard to see, which is why so far even the smallest yet discovered are much much larger than the Earth. Comments? Questions? Why not … Continue reading →
