Recent content by jpdemers

woooooo

There are two conflicting definitions. One applies a "right-hand rule": if the fingers of your right hand indicate the direction of rotation, your thumb points north. The other is the International Astronomers Union (IAU) convention: the hemisphere of a planet that is mostly above the...

With the planet on its side, how did anybody decide which pole was "North"?

The weirdest thing about Venus is that the atmosphere at ground level is so hot and pressurized that it's no longer a gas - it's supercritical CO2, with a density of about 4 lbs per cubic foot. The surface of the planet has more in common with the bottom of an ocean than with dry land under an...

The astronomers who did the measurements are just as skeptical as any of us are - they explicitly say that it's the result of a previously unknown process, which could be organic or inorganic. The latter, of course, is far more likely. Given the critical role of metalloenzymes in life as we...

Russian denials are as predictable as the sunrise - as are the eyerolls from everybody on the planet, even within Russia. Do they really think there's an audience for this absurd act? It was old and worn-out when the USSR was still a thing - now it's just pathetic.

They haven't really 'solved' the mystery, they've just replaced it with another: the asymmetry may be due to KREEP-enriched material on the near side, but even if that's correct, we're left with "why is the near side enriched in KREEP?"

I think the origami-like looks derive from the fact that the super-hard steel that the body is made from can only be bent, and not formed into elegantly-shaped panels like more mallable steels and aluminum alloys.

The hottest place in the universe is a gas cloud surrounding a cluster of galaxies that appears in the Virgo constellation, where temperatures reach 300,000,000 K. Nobody is sure how it got that hot.