Louis Pasteur once said, “Science knows no country, because knowledge belongs to humanity, and is the torch which illuminates the world.” The act of doing science should not, and cannot, be confined to people in lab coats with multiple degrees squinting at computer screens and scribbling on whiteboards. Exploring the natural world around us should be something everyone can take part in, and that’s what citizen science is…
Looking back into the archives of scientific papers published in the past few decades, the majority have one, or at most four, authors. Most projects were conducted by a single individual (or a man and multiple uncredited women, but that’s a whole different topic than what I’d like to discuss here): one person started with… Read more »
The anniversary of the first steps on the moon is today and undoubtedly you’ve seen a lot of images from the landing. News media love to show the footprints, the saluting of the flag, and the Earth-rise over the lunar surface. However there are many pictures that get overlooked. So here we present 5 photos (and… Read more »
Planets are formed in “protoplanetary disks” composed of gas and dust orbiting a central star. Once a planet has formed in the disk, the radius of its orbit can change due to gravitational forces between the planet and material in the disk. In this way, planets can migrate from their original location, a phenomenon that… Read more »
Our understanding of the formation of planetary systems has historically been based on the observations about our own Solar System. A planet is a roughly spherical object orbiting a star that has sufficiently strong gravity to clear its orbital path of other debris. The four terrestrial planets (Earth, Venus, Mercury, and Mars) of our Solar… Read more »
Anyone growing up in the 1990s or earlier would recollect that our solar system had nine planets, but did you ever wonder if planets exist outside the solar system? Planets found outside of our solar system are called extrasolar planets or exoplanets. Approximately 5,600 exoplanet candidates have been discovered since 1993, and nearly 2,000 exoplanets have… Read more »