Category Archives: Astronomy

All about astronomy: What it is, how the Solar System works, famous astronomers and more

What is a satellite?

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When you have two bodies orbiting each other (For example, the Earth and the Moon), we call the smaller of the two the Satellite of the larger.  Thus the planets are satellites of the Sun, the Moon is a satellite of Earth, and so on.  But when most people talk about satellites, they are referring to artificial satellites.  These are manufactured objects which have been launched into space and carefully maneuvered into orbit around something much more massive like a … Continue reading →

How many moons does Jupiter have?

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Current total: 95. I’ll keep updating this page as more get discovered. Details in the UPDATES section below As of 2 February 2012, we know of 67 moons around Jupiter.  We will probably continue to find more and more, as we keep looking, since Jupiter is large enough that it constantly captures passing asteroids and comets, turning them into moons.  The smallest ones are so hard to see, and have such big irregular orbits, that astronomers sometimes lose them, until … Continue reading →

Will we see two suns on 21 June?

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  Edit:  This article was posted on 21 June, the very day that the email discusses.  Obviously it would have been simpler to just say “Stick your head out the window.  How many suns do you see?  Any questions?”, but emails like this tend to get recycled.  Some genius adjusts the date (that “Mars as big as the Moon” hoax has hit my inbox every august for years now) to move the supposed event back into the future, and the … Continue reading →

Nibiru (part 1)

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(This article was originally written in the run-up to the big 2012 apocalypse hoax.  Since then, people are still convinced that Nibiru is out there and visible to people like me in the Southern Hemisphere.  Let me state up front:  It’s not there, and I can’t see it.  I can see comets only a few kilometers across, and I can see galaxies millions of light years away, but there is no major planet barelling through the Solar System towards us, … Continue reading →

The 13th sign of the Zodiac

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Yesterday afternoon I was contacted by a journalist who wanted to know if I knew anything about the “new zodiac”.  It seems that there’s a 13th sign, which means that all the other star sign dates will have to change to make room.  We’ll probably all have to change to a different sign, and some of us will now be an ‘Ophiuchus’ (One way to pronounce it is something like oh-PHEW-cuss, in case you were wondering).  My first impulse was … Continue reading →