Daily Archives: March 20, 2022

The Sun’s Nuclear Fusion

Posted on March 20, 2022 by solarelizabeth

The Sun has been producing a huge amount of energy for over 4 billion years through nuclear fusion. Nuclear fusion is the process by which the Sun converts mass to energy. Albert Einstein’s equation, E=mc^2, reveals that a little bit of mass has a huge amount of potential energy which indicates why the sun has […] Continue reading →

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Blog#4 Dark Energy and Dark Matter

Posted on March 20, 2022 by Irene

Dark Energy and Dark Matter sound both exotic (and yes they absolutely are) but they have very different meanings and opposite effects: One expands our universe while one creates more gravity. High-z Supernova Search Team was founded in 1994 and in 1998 they found that one investigated supernova is fainter than Hubble’s law predicted. This […] Continue reading →

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Blog#3 Radioactive Decay

Posted on March 20, 2022 by Irene

Our world is composed of elements all of which are made of protons, neutrons, and electrons. Protons are positively charged while electrons are negatively charged. Unstable (i.e., radioactive) atomic nuclei can become more stable after the emission of particles and energy, a process called radioactive decay. These emitted particles or energy (the latter emitted as […] Continue reading →

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Halley’s Comet

Posted on March 20, 2022 by jesszhang782

Halley’s Comet was the first comet understood to be a periodic comet, or a comet that can pass through the solar system multiple times. The English astronomer Edmund Halley (1656-1742) noticed that the previously recorded orbits of three comets were ve… Continue reading →

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Solar Sailing Through The Sea of Space

Posted on March 20, 2022 by josephmaquino9

As an imaginative mind might ask: can we use the Sun’s light to propel a spacecraft through space? Surprisingly, this avenue of spacecraft propulsion has, and is being, explored. Figure 1 displays the Japanese IKAROS satellite that was deployed on May 21, 2010. The spacecraft was equipped with a 14 m x 14 m solar […] Continue reading →

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Mercury and its core | blog IV

Posted on March 20, 2022 by clviggiano

Measuring just over one-third of Earth’s diameter, Mercury is the smallest terrestrial planet in the solar system. However, relative to other worlds, Mercury’s core constitutes a very large part of its volume. Despite the vast difference in their scale, “Mercury’s inner core is indeed solid [and] very nearly the same size as Earth’s inner core,” […] Continue reading →

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Black Holes!

Posted on March 20, 2022 by Emily Bertram

Black holes are regions of spacetime where gravity is so strong that nothing can escape. I have always found the idea of black holes because they can be hard to understand or conceptualize. A weird fact about black holes is how hot they are on the outside and how incredibly freezing they are on the […] Continue reading →

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Climate Change

Posted on March 20, 2022 by Emily Bertram

We have all heard of climate change but what does it really mean? Climate change can be explained by the change in temperature and weather patterns that are occurring over long periods of time. Humans are at fault for climate change because we continue to burn fossil fuels like oil and coal. Burning fossil fuels […] Continue reading →

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The Expanding Universe

Posted on March 20, 2022 by parallaxHubble

The Universe is expanding – and expanding at a rate that is accelerating. Based off simple knowledge of physics, one would assume that this would be the opposite. The Universe should be shrinking over time as gravity slowly pulls billions of galaxy clusters, galaxies, stars, and solar systems towards each other on an inevitable collisionContinue reading “The Expanding Universe” Continue reading →

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Star Fuel – Nuclear Fusion

Posted on March 20, 2022 by parallaxHubble

The sun has been around for 4.603 billion years, about one third of the entire duration of the universe. With a mass 330,000 times greater than Earth and a radius 108 times larger (source), the sun is a very massive object (though not that large when compared to other stars). Have you ever wondered whatContinue reading “Star Fuel – Nuclear Fusion” Continue reading →

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