Tag: space

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The Tiny Speck That Is Our Home . . .

Greetings, fellow Earthlings! Did you know our planet was tiny? Take a look at this scale model of the planets in our solar system, arranged in front of a scale model of our sun! Earth is one of the little balls in the bottom right corner! Compared to our sun, or even to a lot of the planets in our solar system, the earth looks miniature!

And this image doesn’t communicate the vast, empty space between the sun and each of the planets. It also doesn’t show that our comparatively giant sun is merely a mid-size star, and that it is just one of 100 million twinkling stars in the sky. Not all those stars are visible from earth, of course!

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Which falls faster, a hammer or a feather?

Does as heavy object fall faster than a lighter one? What about a much lighter one? Check out this video clip where astronauts on the moon find out!

Apollo 15 Astronaut David Scott performing a science demonstration on the moon in 1971!

During the Apollo 15 mission on the moon, Commander David Scott performed a science demonstration for all the world to see! He dropped a geologic hammer and a falcon feather and dropped them at the same time. Which do you think hit the ground first?

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Is the Sun Yellow?

Typical representation of our yellow sun!

We all reach for the yellow crayon when it’s time to draw the sun, right? And we know the sun is yellow because Superman gets his superpowers from a “yellow star.”

But light is a tricky thing! In space, the sun would appear white. By the time we see light from the sun, it has traveled 92,955,807 miles through space and through our atmosphere, which bends and filters light.

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