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A meteoroid that survives passing through the atmosphere without disintegrating is then called a “meteorite.”  Most meteoroids do not survive their journey through the Earth’s atmosphere and disintegrate into very small particles.  It is estimated that each day the Earth gains over a thousand ton of mass from the fall of tiny meteorites.

When can meteors be seen?

Every day millions of small particles enter the Earth’s atmosphere and cause meteors.  Most meteors are so brief or small that they go unnoticed.  Most meteors can only be seen at night, although some a bright enough to be visible during the day.  Small meteors, as small as pebbles, might appear for a second or two before disappearing, while larger ones stay visible longer and sometimes appear brighter as they burn up while disintegrating.  A very bright meteor is called a fireball.

A meteor’s altitude is usually within the 75 to 100 kilometer range in the atmosphere, or the Earth’s mesosphere.  A meteor is visible to an observer around 65-120 kilometers above the Earth’s surface.

What creates a meteor?

The bright light that is a meteor is the result of heat produced by a meteoroid’s entry into the atmosphere.  The ram pressure, or pressure exerted by the meteoroid moving at high velocities through the atmosphere, generates heat.  This pressure then heats the meteorite and the air molecules around it.  The surface of the meteoroid reaches high enough temperatures to vaporize some of the atoms and molecules on it as well as atmospheric gases around the meteoroid.  These heated, ionized particles form the trail of glowing vapors that we see as a meteor.   Meteors appear very briefly because the vaporized gases in the bright streak cool and disperse rather quickly.

Where do meteoroids come from?

The use of “meteor” to refer to the actual cosmic rocks is actually incorrect and not technical; these celestial objects are actually meteoroids.  Where do meteoroids come from?  A scientist would tell you they come from asteroids, or some come from comets, and some from the Moon or Mars.

What are meteor showers?

Though millions pass through the Earth each day, throughout the year an unusually large amount of meteors may occur at the same time.  This occurrence is known as a meteor shower.  Meteor showers sometimes occur when the Earth passes through remnants of a comet that passed through while orbiting the Sun.

What are meteors made of?

Meteors are made of vaporized and ionized gas trails of meteoroids.  Meteoroids and meteorites are made of minerals rich in various compositions of silicon, sodium, copper, potassium, iron, and nickel.

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Photosynthesis: The Basics

• Process Description: Photosynthesis is a process used by plants, algae, and certain bacteria to convert light energy, usually from the sun, into chemical energy.
• Chemical Reaction: In simple terms, photosynthesis uses carbon dioxide (CO₂) and water (H₂O), facilitated by sunlight, to produce glucose (a sugar) and oxygen.
• By-product: Oxygen is released as a by-product of this reaction.

Historical Impact

• Early Earth Atmosphere: Earth's early atmosphere, formed over 4 billion years ago, was rich in gases like methane, ammonia, water vapor, and carbon dioxide, but had little or no free oxygen.
• Appearance of Photosynthetic Organisms: About 3.4 billion years ago, photosynthetic organisms, such as cyanobacteria, began to emerge. These organisms started the process of converting sunlight, CO₂, and H₂O into glucose and oxygen.
• Great Oxygenation Event: Roughly 2.4 billion years ago, the oxygen produced by these organisms began to accumulate in the atmosphere, leading to a dramatic increase in atmospheric oxygen – an event known as the Great Oxygenation Event.

Oxygen’s Current Role

• Atmospheric Composition: Today, oxygen makes up approximately 21% of the Earth's atmosphere.
• Crucial for Life: This oxygen is crucial for the survival of aerobic organisms, including humans, as it is used in the process of cellular respiration.

Photosynthesis's Ongoing Impact

• Continuous Process: Photosynthesis continues to be a vital process, maintaining the level of oxygen in the atmosphere. Without ongoing photosynthesis, atmospheric oxygen levels would start to decline.
• Ecological Balance: The balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is critical for maintaining Earth's climate and supporting life.

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The meteorite has gained its fame from one of the world’s best-loved superheroes, Superman. The Man of Steel’s Achilles’ heel is the mineral kryptonite – and the villains in his life have probably thanked all the meteorites that encapsulated the small substance.

But what is a meteorite? And where does it come from?

The universe consists of heavenly bodies – mainly planets, galaxies, stars, and asteroids (rocky, metallic objects that look like rocks; also known as minor planets). Some of these asteroids take a one-way trip to Earth – should they decide to continue their suicidal collision course, they become meteoroids. When a meteoroid touches our atmosphere, the friction causes it to ignite, and like a match, and burns it.

Now by theory, the meteoroid is supposed to burn up completely. However, in most cases, it doesn’t. The leftover meteoroid has no other choice but to land on the Earth’s surface. It manifests itself as a falling or shooting star (at this point, it is now called a meteor), touches ground and voila! A freshly-landed meteorite is born.

Some of the meteorites have been analyzed. It has been confirmed that their points of origin are mostly lunar (from the moon) and/or Martian (from Mars). They may look like regular rocks, but it is living proof that the existence of other life forms may not be so impossible after all.

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The process occurring in a convection zone is similar to boiling water in a pot thus this is sometimes referred to as boiling zone. Outside the radiation zone, the temperature is much lower compared to the temperature within the region. From about 5 million degrees Kelvin, the temperature drops down to only about 2 million degrees Kelvin. However, this temperature is still relatively higher than within the convection region. What happens during the convection mechanism is that the hotter material near the radiation zone tends to rise. When this reaches the top of the convection region, it cools down and sinks again. This is a direct way to transfer energy and thus occurs much faster than in radiation zone.

The convection zone is considered to be the outermost layer of the interior portion of the sun. This layer extends to about 200,000 km up to the visible surface of the Sun known as the photosphere. When seen through a telescope, a white ball with some dark patches can be observed. These dark patches are termed as sunspots. The entire surface of this region is covered with convection cells similar to what one can be observed on the surface of boiling water. The bright and dark regions represent the hot rising and the cold sinking materials respectively.

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A Nova is one event that happens repeatedly in the universe. This phenomena happens when a star comes to an end. As the light and heat capacity of stars wear throughout the years, it suddenly becomes pale white, thus getting the name “white dwarf”, due to the shrinking and dimming light power of the star. As time passes by, it then explodes, causing the star to burn out its remaining energy and become brighter than it ever was.

One example of this is the Supernova of 1054. This happened in China, when astronomers saw a star so bright that it was seen during the day. And since this occurrence was quite astonishing and odd, this event was recorded.

Books also say that a Nova is the smaller version of a supernova, since an event like this happens with a pair of stars, one which is a white dwarf and that of a cooler star. Since materials are being sucked off by the white dwarf, this causes the explosion of the star, though it may not be totally obliterated.

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A telescope is an instrument used to observe objects from afar. The word is derived from Greek words tele and skopein which means “far” and “to see” respectively. Contrary to popular belief, it was not ‘invented' by Galileo. There has been evidence of a refracting telescope that has been in use in the Netherlands during 1608 and its development was credited to spectacle makers Hans Lippershey and Zacharias Janssen, and a third person Jacob Metius. However, it was Galileo who improved on the devices soon after so they can be used for exploring the heavens.

A telescope works by collecting electromagnetic radiation, which on earth-speak means visible light. However, with the development of space technology, there has risen the capability to utilize the full range of the electromagnetic spectrum and use the radio band. The first radio telescope was used in 1937 and there have been subsequent development of telescopes that can work with other wavelengths such as gamma rays.

Photo by: Mike Peel Creative Commons

A telescope has A telescope has three major capabilities – the ability to magnify, the ability to resolve images and create sharp images and the most important being the ability to collect light so it ‘sees' better (which is also the reason why your pupils enlarge when the room is dark or when it's nighttime). The part of a telescope which collects light is the ‘objective'. The objective of a refractor telescope is a glass lens and a reflector telescope uses a (surprise, surprise) mirror.

The first telescopes used to observe the heavens where refractor telescopes and they were subject to problems of chromic aberration or color distortion and spherical aberration among others. It wasn't until 1668 that the first practical reflecting telescope was developed by no other than Sir Isaac Newton with the idea that parabolic mirrors can reduce aberration and more than a hundred years after, achromatic lenses where developed and the rest, as they say, is history.

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The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is a combined name for those activities related to the continuous search for any intelligent extraterrestrial life in the universe, other than earth. These activities and projects apply various scientific methods to scan the vast space for any forms of electromagnetic transmissions from intelligent civilizations on those distant planets. Early contributors to the SETI projects include the U.S. government, but recent projects are now primarily funded by various private sources.

The continuous search all around the cosmos for that first-ever intelligent transmission is a real challenge, since the general direction of the transmission and the communication methods remains unknown. Because of this, SETI projects have to make all those vital assumptions just to narrow the search grid, given the vastness of space. And with that came the first assumption that intelligent species, who could be of course hundreds, or even million years old well ahead of us could be using technology way beyond our imagination, probably through electromagnetic radiation as their way of communicating.

Various radio experiments have undertaken just for this purpose. They do so with the knowledge that several radio frequencies are well capable of penetrating our atmosphere, which then led to the use of radio telescopes investigating the cosmos using their large radio antennas all the time. Also, our planet emits radio radiation considerably because of our televisions and radio. Their radiations are easily recognizable as artificial. This can make the process of detecting those non-natural radio emissions from anywhere outside the solar system more manageable.

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A nebula or a “newborn star” appears like a cloud of gas and dust. More accurately, a nebula cloud is actually the birthplace of not just one but many stars. Nebulae (the plural of nebula) are mostly made up of hydrogen and other gases, and these determine the nebula’s appearance and, consequently, its classification or kind. There are emission nebulae, reflection nebulae, and even dark nebulae, to mention a few types.

The next phase in a star's life cycle is as a “regular” star––the kind seen normally in the nighttime skies, and of which the sun in our solar system is a good example. Our own sun is comparable to a teen-age star.

Millions of years later, a normal star will become a red giant, and then a red dwarf, and finally a white dwarf or a neutron star. A neutron star is much smaller than it used to be, like a drastically shrunken version of the original, but it is still very hot. The average neutron star is just about 1% the size of our sun, or as big as the earth, but its temperature can be something like 8,000 degrees Celsius. It is also much less bright than a regular star. Eventually, a neutron star cools and then fades. The whole process of a star’s “death” takes billions of years.

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Venus

Actually, the planet Mercury has the same behavior of being visible at dawn and at dusk. However, it can only be observed during a few weeks in a year. Since Venus is much larger and closer to earth, it has earned the title.

Because of its proximity to the sun, Venus is always found on the same side of the sky. If the sun is just setting to the west, the “star” can only be found at the west too. Its sulfuric acid clouds are highly reflective, causing it to glow brightly.

Venus is usually called the earth’s twin in terms of size, composition and gravitational pull. However, the atmosphere of the Evening Star is too hostile for life to exist. The atmospheric pressure on its surface is about 90 times greater than the earth’s. The air is also mostly carbon dioxide.

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