I just finished Bill Bryson’s book “A Short History of Nearly Everything”. An extraordinarily well-written popular science book that I highly recommend. The author takes us on a journey through all ages and through all kind of sciences, and romances the greatest scientific discoveries and principles in a light, exciting, and epic way. In this issue, I would like to share with you some space-related passages and information that caught my attention:
- We can see up to 10^(-34) s after the Big Bang 🤯
- The Pole Star or Polaris, is a cepheid variable. A cepheid is a giant red star that is 4 to 15 times more massive than our Sun and 100 to 30,000 times brighter.
- Several asteroids travel very close to the Earth two or three times a week and we are unable to detect them because the sky is too big to observe and they blow up very quickly.
- The mass of the Earth is increasing as every year the earth accumulates 30,000 tons of cosmic dust. Compared to the mass leaving the Earth, such as satellites, Earth is getting fat!
- An asteroid launched at cosmic speed would enter in the atmosphere so fast that the air underneath would compress as in a pump (and thus heat up to 60,000K). Everything underneath will melt like cellophane in a flame. This temperature will kill everything far before the crash.
- After the Bing Bang, 98% of all matter in our universe was created in the first 3 minutes.
- And last but not least, there are around 600 species (plants, insects, and animals) extinction per week 😔!
END OF TRANSMISSION.