We are all space travelers. But we’ve stayed close to home until now. One day, we may leave our "mother ship" Earth to make our home among the stars. A giant, spherical" spaceship", about 8,000 miles in diameter, is speeding through the solar system right now. It is cruising at...
★ Mercury is the closest and second smallest in the Solar System. ★ Mercury is the second densest planet after Earth. ★ The only visit to Mercury was a flyby made by the Mariner 10 spacecraft in 1974. ★ Mercury speeds around the sun every 88 days, traveling through space at nearly ...
This changed in 1915 when Albert Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity trashed every claim about the existence of Vulcan. Einstein said that massive objects like the Sun could bend time and space. Mercury’s orbit often changed because it was traveling through a “distorted space-time” caused...
Well, as Bailer-Jones indicates, that’s not really a practical idea: “Traveling to a star passing our solar system at a distance of around 1 pc with a relative speed of 30 km/s is no easier than traveling the the nearby stars (the nearest of which is just o...
Planets of thesolar systemdo not orbit in the plane of the galaxy but are tipped by about 63 degrees. "It's almost like we're sailing through the galaxy sideways," Merav Opher, an astrophysicist at George Mason University in Virginia, told Space.com. ...
Lying just beyond Mars and certainly not the only asteroid belt in the solar system, this one is the granddaddy. Ceres is believed to make up as much as a third of the total mass of the objects in the asteroid belt. If anyone is really serious about exploiting these space rocks, this ...
Finally, the outermost layer, the corona, extends far beyond the visible surface, reaching millions of kilometers into space. Solar Activity and its Impact: The sun is not a static entity but rather a dynamic star, exhibiting a range of activities that influence Earth and th...
through our solar system, witnessing Earth's evolution over geologic time. He gives us an astronomer's-eye view of our current global environmental crisis, helping us see our predicament through the lens of time and space, which gives us a far better perspective – especially on issues like ...
The object approached our solar system from almost directly “above” the ecliptic, the approximate plane in space where the planets and most asteroids orbit the Sun, so it did not have any close encounters with the eight major planets during its plunge toward the Sun. On September 2, the ...
After the record-setting 2015 flyby of Pluto and its moons, the New Horizons spacecraft continued its journey through the outer reaches of the Solar System. In that same year, NASA selected a new target for New Horizons to observe: a Kuiper Belt object discovered by the Hubble Space Telesco...