7 Responses

1. Marco Yaquinto says:

   13 November 2012 at 6:16 pm

   Madeline i found your post extremely interesting i did not know that there was only one comet I could see in someones life. Did you know that on this day back in the year 764 Tibetan troops invaded China and tried to over throw the Tang Dynasty. Just some more facts about the day November 12th.

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2. Mary Rabe says:

   29 November 2012 at 6:38 pm

   Also on this day in history, in 607, Pope Boniface III died. He succeeded Pope Sabinian after he died in February 606. Pope Boniface, however, did not begin his papacy until about a year later.

   Although his time as pope was less than a year, his contributions to the organization of the church were significant. He decreed that it was forbidden for anyone during a pope’s lifetime to discuss the appointment of his successor under pain of excommunication. He also said that no steps could be taken to provide for a papal successor until three days after a pope’s burial. It is thought that he desired to keep papal elections free and fair. Boniface also made sure that the title of “Universal Bishop” could only be used by the Bishop of Rome.

   Mary Rabe

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3. Dylan Cook says:

   4 December 2012 at 5:54 pm

   November 12th also marks the death of King Canute (also spelled Cnut, Knud) in 1035. King Canute was the ruler of a large kingdom that included much of the northern European countries Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and even parts England. He is the son of Danish King Sweyn Forkbeard, and Cnut’s grandfather was the Ruler during the time Christianity spread through out Denmark. Canute was the first King to accept this religion. He was very a forceful conquerer claiming land in these other countries. He was a viking in his younger days before Kingship, so that explains it pretty well. King Canute died and was burried in Wessex, where he lived. His sons did not “have the guts” like him and after his death the Anglo-Scandinavian empire begun to break up.

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4. david collins says:

   5 December 2012 at 5:59 pm

   The study of astronomy is very interesting. The Nobel Prize in physics in 2011 was given to 3 astronomers Saul Perlmutter, Brian P. Schmidt and Adam G. Riess, for the discovery of the expansion of the Universe through obserations of distant supernovae.

   What they did was they used type-1A supernovae which have an intrinsic luminosity, we know exactly how bright they are because they only occur when a white dwarf-

   -A white dwarf is a medium class star, like our sun, at the end that has burnt off its outer layers and collapsed down but not all the way! Something called electron degeneracy pressure is holding it up.

   -is in binary orbit with another star. The white dwarf continuously sucks all the matter from the orbiting star because of its immense gravitational pull. And the white dwarf is in a stable system, until it exceeds a mass of 1.44x the mass our our Sun(this is called the Chandrasekhar limit) and the star is now unstable. At this point the star explodes and because we have this limit 1.44x the mass of our sun, we can calculate the luminosity of these supernovae, the brightness of the explosion, which, for all of these class of exploding stars, is the same.

   They took photographs of these supernovae over the course of a few years, and they found that the supernovae were not as bright as they should have been, and through this they concluded that they were moving away faster than we thought and that the Universe is actually expanding.

   It’s interesting, because of this we will never see the Universe as it is right now, because the light from distance stars and galaxies would takes billions of years to reach our eyes if everything was standing still. If the universe was stationary, the night sky would be as bright as the Sun, even at night. But now we know everything is accelerating away from us so in the distant future the sky will be almost completely dark.

   They proved the Universe is expanding, so people started looking for a reason why this counter intuitive event would be occurring. In doing so scientists investigated dark matter, dark energy and a cosmological constant which Albert Einstein predicted and would later reveal it to be the greatest scientific blunder of his career, and now he’s been vindicated after so many years.

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5. Brendon Wheeler says:

   7 December 2012 at 2:01 am

   The study of space has always interested me, its truly amazing how far our technology and understanding have come in such a short period of time. Scientists discover hundreds of new asteroids, galaxies, stars, and other celestial bodies each day. in fact astronomers discovered a new asteroid on may 29th 2012 that has made one of the closest passes to earth in recorded history only 14000 kilometers!

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6. Theron Leclerc says:

   9 December 2012 at 9:37 pm

   Here’s a fun fact: Comets are also known as “dirty snowballs”. This is mainly due to the fact that they are made of ice (unlike asteroids, which are primarily rock). They have two tails: the dust tail and the ion tail, the latter of which is constantly facing away from the Sun. Comets can be separated into two groups, long period (which come from the Oort Cloud) and short period (which come from the Kuiper Belt), depending on their orbital time. Another little known fact is that meteor showers are actually the result of the Earth passing through the debris left behind in a comet’s orbit.

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7. Justin Ghannam says:

   9 December 2012 at 9:48 pm

   I love reading about space related things. It’s a lot more interesting to learn things you can’t exactly just go out and figure out. It appears Halley’s Comet was observed not only by the Babylonians but medieval European chroniclers also. However they didn’t acknowledge it as the same item at the time.
   The last sighting for Halley’s Comet was in 1986, and won’t be expected to make it’s return to earth until 2061.

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