The sun after sunset
Where can you see sunlight after the sun has set? In the zodiac or sometimes directly opposite the sun in the night sky.
Category: Astronomy
The nearest planet
What’s the nearest planet to Earth? On average, it’s Mercury. What’s the nearest planet to Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune? Also Mercury.
Earth’s shadow
That band of deep blue in the sky opposite a sunrise or sunset? It’s the shadow of the planet.
Second human in orbit
Yuri Gagarin may have been the first person to orbit the Earth in space, but Gherman Titov was the first to orbit the Earth more than once, the first to pilot a spacecraft, and the first to throw up in space.
The equation of time
When a day is longer or shorter than 24 hours you need to use the equation of time to bring it back into sync.
The Great Attractor
Somewhere in the sky, obscured from our view by the Milky Way, an unknown anomaly called the Great Attractor pulls a hundred thousand galaxies around.
Black diamond mystery
Where do black diamonds come from? We don’t actually know.
The origins of elements
Where do the elements come from? Nuclear astrophysics proposes several origins, depending on the element: the Big Bang, dying and exploding stars, and cosmic rays.
Runaway stars
Most stars are part of galaxies, but some are hurled out of their usual orbits by supernovae, galactic collisions, and black holes. These are the runaway stars, some of the fastest stars known.
Fastest things
What’s the fastest object ever made by humans? In 1957 a 900kg steel plate may have been launched into space by a nuclear explosion, but it has since been eclipsed by far faster things.
Lunar quarantine
When the Apollo 11 astronauts arrived back on Earth, no-one knew whether they were contaminated with secret space viruses or not – so the astronauts stayed in an Airstream trailer under quarantine for three weeks.
Interstellar comet
Two years ago ʻOumuamua was the first interstellar object to be detected passing through our solar system. But the second interstellar object, the comet 2I/Borisov, is passing through right now.
Spacedust buster
The portable vacuum cleaner Dustbuster was built on the back of technology for the moon landings.
Boiling saliva
There is a point not more than 20km away from you right now where your normal body temperature is enough to boil the saliva off your tongue and the moisture out of your lungs.
Space ice
Water freezes into ice. This is not new information to you (I hope). But which kind? Because there are eighteen different phases of ice, including electric viral space ice.
Metric martians
The Mars Climate Orbiter space probe cost 327 million US dollars – and it crashed because of a mix-up between the metric and imperial systems.
The Generalist Academy 