All my life I have been reading interesting items of information – too many either to remember or to write down – but occasionally I read things so interesting I feel I have to record them so that I don’t forget. Here are some facts about astronomy that haven’t been mentioned before in my website:
There are 283 ancient Chinese constellations, and they are quite different from those used in Britain today.
In 2020 Data from the Gaia satellite revealed that 11,000 million years ago the Milky Way merged with a galaxy that has been given the name ‘Craken’. The Gaia camera has 1000 million pixels.
The universe contains 1080 quarks, 1089 neutrinos and 1089 photons
The solar system:
Sunlight at the distance of Neptune is 900 times dimmer than it is on the earth, and yet excellent photographs have been taken of its satellite Triton.
There are 100,000 named asteroids in the solar system. The planet Theia (pronounced thayer) collided with the earth 4,530 million years ago.
There are no maria on the far side of the Moon.
In 2019 the first comet was discovered that originated outside the solar system.
The Higgs Boson:
The mystery of the Higgs Boson, featured in my last blog, did not take so long to resolve as the mystery of D.N.A. A single boson was created by a team of 6000 people in 2012 and survived for only 1021 seconds, but these particles did once occur in nature. In fact, in the very early universe there were nothing but Higgs Bosons.