1884: Geographers and astronomers adopt Greenwich as the Prime Meridian, the international standard for zero degrees longitude.
The late 19th century was an era of standardization. With the Second Industrial Revolution stimulating world trade, the Treaty of the Meter established the International System of weights and measures in 1875. With railroads linking together entire continents, nations [...]
Posts Tagged ‘Astronomy’
Oct. 13, 1884: Greenwich Resolves Subprime Meridian Crisis
October 13th, 2010 |
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Oct. 8, 1582: Nothing Happens … in Catholic Lands
October 8th, 2010 |
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1582: Nobody does anything, anything at all. In fact, nobody does anything whatsoever between Oct. 4 and Oct. 15, 1582, because the 10 intervening days have simply been declared out of existence by the pope. (This offer may not apply outside Italy, Spain and Portugal.)
Where did those days go?
By the mid-1570s, the Julian Calendar established [...]
September 3, 1976: Viking 2 Lands on Mars
September 3rd, 2010 |
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1976: Viking 2, the second mission to Mars, lands on the planet and begins transmitting pictures and soil analyses.
The Viking mission went to Mars to look for signs of life, to study the soil and atmosphere, and to take pictures. There were two launches of paired orbiters and landers, aboard Titan-Centaur rockets. Each orbiter took [...]
Aug. 25, 1989: Voyager 2, Meet Neptune
August 25th, 2010 |
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1989: Voyager 2 makes its closest encounter with Neptune, passing just 3,000 miles above the cloud tops of the most distant planet in our solar system.
The Voyager 2 space probe has been our most productive unmanned space voyage. It visited all four of the outer planets and their systems of moons and rings, including the [...]
Aug. 24, 2006: Pluto Deplanetized
August 24th, 2010 |
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By Tony Long and Doug Cornelius
2006: Pluto, once the ninth planet from the sun, is downgraded to a mere “dwarf planet.” Our solar system loses a favorite kid brother and now has, officially, only eight planets.
Pluto was discovered by American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh on Feb. 18, 1930. Comparing photographs taken of the same section [...]
Aug. 5, 1962: First Quasar Discovered
August 5th, 2010 |
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1962: A nearly botched observation of a distant radio source leads to the identification of the first-known quasi-stellar astronomical object, or quasar.
Until the development of radio astronomy in the 1940s, our knowledge of the universe outside our own solar system was pretty much restricted to objects that emitted light in or near the visible [...]
July 14, 1965: Mariner 4 Brings Mars Up Close and Cardinal
July 14th, 2010 |
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1965: After a few million years of watching Mars from afar, humanity meets the red planet — not quite in person, but through the eyes of NASA’s Mariner 4 satellite.
The half-ton space camera flew past Mars eight months after being shot from Earth on an Atlas rocket, having traveled 325 million miles. It flew within [...]
May 20, 1990: Hubble Opens Its Eye … and Blinks
May 19th, 2010 |
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1990: The Hubble Space Telescope sends its first image back to Earth.
The new telescope’s imaging prowess clearly exceeded that of the best ground-based telescopes, as shown in the image above of stars in the Carina cluster. But after a few weeks, scientists began to realize something was amiss.
Hubble’s images weren’t as sharp as they should [...]
Feb 23, 1987: ‘Quintessential’ Supernova Bursts on the Scene
February 23rd, 2010 |
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1987: Light from the brightest supernova of the 20th century reaches Earth from 168,000 light-years away.
At the University of Toronto’s observatory in the foothills of the Andes mountains, 30-year-old astronomer Ian Shelton was looking at photographic plates in the wee hours of Feb. 24, while listening to Pink Floyd’s The Wall. The plates covered an [...]
Feb. 19, 1473: Copernicus Born
February 19th, 2010 |
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1473: Nicolaus Copernicus is born in Torun, Poland, of German parents, leading both countries to claim him as their own.
The astronomer was not so eagerly embraced by the Catholic Church, however, after becoming the most prominent advocate of the heliocentric theory that placed Earth in orbit around a stationary sun, an idea that stood in [...]
Jan. 8, 1942: Birthday of a First-Rate Mind, and a Medical Marvel
January 8th, 2010 |
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1942: British physicist Stephen Hawking is born.
Hawking was born in Oxford, where his parents moved to escape the German Blitz on London. His website notes, in an interesting historical aside, that his birth came on the 300th anniversary of Galileo’s death.
Though naturally predisposed to mathematics, young Hawking switched to physics, because University College at Oxford [...]
Dec. 30, 1924: Hubble Reveals We Are Not Alone
December 30th, 2009 |
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1924: Astronomer Edwin Hubble announces that the spiral nebula Andromeda is actually a galaxy and that Milky Way is just one of many galaxies in the universe.
Before Copernicus and Galileo, humans thought our world was the center of creation. Then (except for a few notable stragglers) we learned that the sun and planets did not [...]
Nov. 17, 1790: A Rather One-Sided Affair
November 17th, 2009 |
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1790: Mathematician, astronomer and physicist August Ferdinand Möbius is born in Schulpforta, Saxony (in modern-day Germany).
Möbius has name recognition today because of the Möbius strip, which is a clever topological surface with only one side and only one edge.
Speaking of name recognition, Möbius probably pronounced the name something like MER-bee-oos (first syllable rhymes with [...]
Oct. 22, 1905: A Star Discoverer Is Born
October 22nd, 2009 |
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1905: Karl Guthe Jansky is born in Oklahoma. He’ll discover that some of the “static” afflicting radio signals comes from distant stars. The new field of radio astronomy will widen and deepen our view of the universe.
See also:
Photo Gallery —
70 Years of Telescopes Tuned to Cosmic Radio
Jansky studied physics at the University of Wisconsin [...]
Sept. 25, 2002: Mysterious Meteorite Dazzles Siberia
September 25th, 2009 |
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2002: A large fireball flashes across the night skies of the Irkutsk region of Siberia. What may have been a comet causes electrical circuits to come alive and leaves residents worrying about radioactivity.
Eyewitnesses saw the sky light up. More than a hundred people in the sparsely settled area reported seeing it.
At least one person fell [...]
Aug. 21, 1989: Voyager 2 Reaches Triton
August 21st, 2009 |
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1989: Twelve years and one day after liftoff, Voyager 2 reaches Triton, the largest of Neptune’s eight moons and the coldest, most unusual satellite in our solar system.
Launched from Cape Canaveral on Aug. 20, 1977, Voyager 2, as the name suggests, was the second of two identical deep-space probes originally dispatched by NASA to gather [...]
Aug. 19, 1887: What Goes Up Must Come Down
August 19th, 2009 |
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1887: Intent on observing a solar eclipse, a celebrated Russian chemist uses a hot-air balloon to make a solo ascent above the clouds near Moscow, even though he has never been in a balloon before and has no idea how to land one.
Even if Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev had never gotten around to outlining the principles [...]
Aug. 18, 1868: Helium Discovered During Total Solar Eclipse
August 18th, 2009 |
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1868: A French astronomer spots an unknown element, now known as helium, in the spectrum of the sun during a much-anticipated total eclipse. The event marks the first discovery of an “extraterrestrial” element, as helium had not yet been found on Earth.
Astronomers had been eagerly awaiting a total solar eclipse since 1859, when German physicist [...]
The future of astronomy: Black-sky thinking
August 13th, 2009 |
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The first of four articles from the International Astronomical Union meeting looks at a battle between Big Science and human hunches
SINCE time immemorial man has looked at the stars in awe and wonderment. No longer. The observatories where light is collected are now run by robots that neither dirty the instruments nor take night-time naps. Does it matter? Some of the astronomers at this year’s meeting of the International Astronomical Union (IAU), held in Rio de Janeiro from August 3rd to 14th, think it does. They discussed what could be done to halt their subject’s trend towards mining data gathered by computers rather than peering into telescopes.
The Rio meeting is the high point of what has been dubbed by the union as the International Year of Astronomy. The reason for picking 2009 to receive this honour is that it is exactly 400 years since Galileo Galilei turned his telescope on the heavens to study what the naked eye could not disclose, and also since Johannes Kepler revealed to the world that planetary orbits are ellipses, not circles. These two events can be seen, in retrospect, as the beginning of modern astronomy. …
The politics of climate change
July 28th, 2009 |
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This week’s guest is writer and eco-warrior Jonathon Porritt.
As the founding director of the sustainable development NGO, Forum for the Future, and, until this month, chair of the UK Sustainable Development Commission, when Porritt speaks about global warming people listen. The former director of Friends of the Earth and trustee of WWF came into the pod to fill in the British government’s scorecard on tackling climate change.
The astronomer Carl Sagan was a prolific scientist, pioneering the study of exobiology and astrochemistry and promoting the search for extraterrestrial life. One of his biggest achievements was Cosmos, a 13-part science documentary series first aired in the US in 1980. In it, he took viewers on a journey around the universe describing everything from atoms to galaxies and set a gold standard for science on television.
Alok Jha speaks to Sagan’s widow Ann Druyan, who was also one of the writers on Cosmos.
You can win a DVD box set of the classic documentary series by entering our competition.
Pursuing the cosmic theme, we visit a new exhibition at London’s Science Museum that shows how astronomy has influenced culture, and how it has changed our behaviour and been popularised. Exhibits include Astronomy Monopoly and a telescope built from baked-bean cans, spare car parts and coat hangers.
As ever, there’s the Newsjam which this week has details of a sharp rise in the number of animal experiments in the UK, the discovery that humans glow in the dark, and fatherhood beckons for our favourite tortoise, Loneseome George.
Stick your neck out. We’d love to hear your views on the show and the week’s science news …
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