Tuesday, 4 October 2022

Autumn Collisions

During the last week of September, a space craft called DART was deliberately smashed into an asteroid to see if their path can be altered. That was the one time I'm aware of that both the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes were both looking at the same object at the same time on 26th of September. They wanted to see if they can change the path of an asteroid so it would miss a collision with Earth in the future. I also noticed James Webb was looking at Neptune for a while; you need a telescope to see Neptune, it is too far away to be seen directly with your eyes. Neptune is a strange planet, it has stronger winds than Uranus but it is further from the sun, winds are supposed to be solar powered, right? Neptune is one of those planets we know very little about. It is the furthest planet from the Sun because Pluto was demoted to a Dwarf Planet, I wonder what 90's-alan would think of that? It was still considered a planet back then.
During the same week, hurricane Ian collided with Florida and caused a disaster for all the people living there. America gets hit by Katrina sized Hurricanes every year now (category 5). At least this time it wasn't collapsing levees and causing flash flooding in new Orleans. If only millennium-alan could see all this, he wouldn't be in doubt of climate change then.  

I also learned that planet Wasp39-b has an atmosphere made of carbon dioxide. Wasp39-b is a planet going around a sun sized yellow dwarf star called wasp39, 700 light years away from our star. They call it a 'hot saturn' because it is close to the parent star and has a similar mass to Saturn. 

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