Tags: Neptune, Planet Neptune, Planet Pluto, planets colliding, Pluto, solar system, Space
On January 21, 1971, Pluto crossed Neptune’s orbit making Pluto the 8th planet from the Sun. On February 11, 1999, Pluto crossed back over Neptune’s orbit to regain its position as the 9th planet from the Sun. It will stay this way for over 200 years. A visual image of the two planets’ orbits can be seen here.
Despite the “crossing of orbits” between the two planets, they will never collide with each other. This is due to two reasons. The first reason is due to their orbits being in resonance. This means that for every two orbits Neptune makes around the Sun, Pluto goes around three times. When Pluto is close to the crossing point, Neptune is somewhere entirely different on its orbit.
The second reason for no such collision is due to the fact that Pluto has a higher orbital plane than Neptune. According to NASA, Pluto will actually never come closer than two billion kilometers from Neptune.
Tags: Great Red Spot, Great Red Storm, Jupiter storms, Jupiter's surfact
The Great Red Spot is a giant storm on Jupiter’s surface. It is similar to a hurricane but much larger in size. In fact, three earths could fit in the size of the Great Red Spot.
Jupiter’s Great Red Spot was first discovered in the 1600’s by astronomer Robert Hooke. The longevity of this storm is at least partially due to the fact that storm never goes over land. Similar to when hurricanes reach land, they lose steam, but the Great Red Spot never encounters land because Jupiter’s surface does not have any.
This CNN news article from earlier this year suggest the declining size of the Great Red Spot. Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley have discovered that the size of the storm has decreased 15% between 1996 and 2006.
Its possible that the storm will disappear someday. Glenn Orton of NASA says “the Great Red Spot may not always be the largest and strongest storm on Jupiter.” New storms are continually spawning and dying, but the Great Red Spot is still king.
Tags: meteor, meteor facts, meteoride, meteorite, shooting star facts
We must start off by saying that a shooting star isn’t actually a star at all. The streaks of light that we see are actually caused by meteoroids entering our planet’s atmosphere. As the meteoroid passes through the atmosphere it burns up and produces a trail of light. As it burns, we call it a meteor and this is what we mistake “shooting stars” to be. If the meteor doesn’t completely burn up in the atmosphere, it hits Earth as a new name, a meteorite.
Shooting stars can be produced by particles as small as a grain of sand! This being said, there are millions of shooting stars everyday. They happen during daytime hours and nighttime hours alike. When you look up at the sky though, you can only see about .005 percent of the total area of the sky. Even with this limited viewing range, on a typical night expect to see a shooting star every ten minutes to fifteen minutes.
