February 14, Valentines Day, marked the farewell of Starman and his cherry red Tesla. Off to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter (Ooops! A slight hick-up during launch with an estimated overshoot from the original planned trajectory of Mars), one final viewing of Starman was made possible by viewing it through the power of the Virtual Telescope project. Unfortunately for all the space and sci-fi junkies, the viewing was not a close up of Starman. Millions of miles away, though the telescope, he appeared as a small white dot skimming across the backdrop of the MilkyWay. Below is the last official photo of Starman after his successful and mesmorising launch.
So Starman, farewell. I salute you and in the spirit of your extraordinary and quirky launch into space, armed with a friendly reminding ‘Don’t panic’ sign mounted to your dashboard, I say ,
‘So long, and thanks for all the fish’
What would your farewell message be?
So this is what it feels like to be a worm on a hook
Have you ever gone fishing? I’ve tried it once with a group of friends. It was a casual affair with a simple reel, hook and bait and we all huddled together along a pier. At the time, I thought the chase was fun and treated it like a competition…until I was struck with the actual reality of catching my prey. I felt awful looking into the goggly eyes of my helpless victim and froze – I couldn’t kill it, I couldn’t remove the hook and put it back into the sea – What to do?!
One of my friends saw the dilemma and took control. His decision was to swiftly kill and place into the bucket. Unsurprisingly, that was the end of my fun for the day. I sat back with some other friends who too had retired from the activity. We did the Aussie thing and cracked a tinny (opened a tin of beer), sat on the pier’s edge, talked nonsense and watched the sun set.
So, have you ever fished?
Back to a favourite stomping ground – aliens and space – and this cartoon happens to be the perfect lead into the topic of black holes. Cool, huh!
Many of you know my affinity with all things astronomical in nature and black holes are up there in my favourite top space wonders of the universe. So tell me, have you ever wondered about the humble black hole and what would happen if you ever had the misfortune of getting sucked into one? Well, you wouldn’t be the first to have wondered. In fact, there are many scientists who dedicate their time to understanding more about the black hole and some of them conduct thought experiments to theorise what would actually happen to someone entering the hole of no return. Many thought experiments have been undertaken and there are three versions that I’m particularly fond of.
If you’re a wee bit curious, click on here to download your very own black hole (yes, I’m not joking this time), along with the thought experiment details. All you need is a computer, printer, scissors and sticky tape and you could be the proud owner of your very own black hole in less than 5 minutes! (Hang on, why are you still reading? You should be in print mode by now).
Hey, and if you enjoy that, come and visit my fun space website. I call it Cosmic Caboodle and if full of, you guessed it – aliens and space stuff.
In the mean time, let me know what you thought of the black hole download above.
I’ve been inspired by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope’s recent discovery of 7 new earth-sized planets within the habitable zone around one star. And what names did they give these beautiful babies of the Milky Way? An uninspiring: b, c, d, e, f, g, h – not even capitals!
But wait, it gets better. The star these planets are revolving around is named TRAPPIST-1 (short for Transiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope); but that name was created for commoners such as myself. It’s astronomical catalogue name is 2MASS J23062928-0502285. No wonder they ran out of imagination by the time they reached the planets.
I’m sure you could do better. What would you call them?
The tagline for the movie Alien was ‘In space, no one can hear you scream’.
Well, I guess I couldn’t help myself and played with the tagline for my own still movie, called a cartoon.
But seriously, why can’t you hear in outer space? You might recall a recent Frank cartoon, which explored the concept of hearing under water. Well, the key to hearing is to understand that sound requires a ‘medium’ for the vibrations to travel through. In outer space, there isn’t much – no air, no gas… well, there might be the odd gas cloud or two, but the gases within the cloud are spread so far apart that you would need a super sensitive microphone to hear it.