Skip to content

ancient

ancient published on No Comments on ancient

it’s easy to think of the ancient egyptians as living at the dawn of civilisation and ourselves as living closer to the end of it, but on a universal scale, we are still the ancient egyptians.

also if you’re baffled by how long 100 trillion years is and want me to put it into perspective: imagine 1 trillion years. now multiply that by 100. there.

vulcan

vulcan published on No Comments on vulcan

i really need to stop trying to explain complex relativity concepts in like two panels. i can barely fit the text.

interestingly the guy who speculated about the existence of vulcan wasn’t just any random astronmer. it was urbain le verrier, who used the exact same method to predict the existence of neptune based on the orbit of uranus in 1846. so statistically speaking when he said “there might be a planet here”, until then he was right 100% of the time.

magnetic tornado

magnetic tornado published on 2 Comments on magnetic tornado

“magnetic tornado” sounds like the kind of technobabble you’d hear in an old star trek episode or a netflix original sci-fi movie.

wait, i hope no one from netflix is reading this. they might start getting ideas. O.O

double sunset

double sunset published on No Comments on double sunset

this is my favourite random factoid about mercury. on most planets the sun moves from east to west, then venus decides to be different and has the sun move from west to east, and then mercury comes along and says “¿porque no los dos?” and makes the sun do a whole reverse parking manoeuvre and then carry on like it was nothing.

i should probably mention that this happens over the course of about 8 earth days and there’s no atmosphere for the sun to light up orange, so it would probably also be the most boring sunset in the solar system, but somehow i don’t think sedna would mind.

mariner 10

mariner 10 published on No Comments on mariner 10

nasa’s mariner 10 was the first probe to ever visit mercury, making 3 flybys of mercury in 1974-75. the next one was nasa’s “messenger”, which orbited mercury from 2011-15, gathering much more detailed data of the planet. the third mission, europe & japan’s “bepicolombo” is on its way to mercury right now, and will make its first flyby this year on october 2, and then enter mercury’s orbit in 2025. get hyped people!

unfortunately we’ve never soft-landed on the planet and there currently aren’t any plans to. we have crashed into it though, which is something i guess. (rip messenger)

phases

phases published on No Comments on phases

a fun consequence of the phases thing is the closer the inner planets are to earth, the less of them is visible. while venus, the closer of the two, is at its brightest during its crescent phase when it’s near earth, mercury is actually at its brightest during its full phase, when its furthest from earth. this makes mercury the only planet in the solar system to technically get brighter the further away from us it is, which is pretty weird.