- Virginia flag banned in Texas district over exposed breast
- Meet the Great Texas Trucker With 4 Million Miles of Safe Driving Under His Belt Buckle – Homero Flores, a career trucker for the Texas-based HEB grocery store, has driven enough miles to circle the earth more than 160 times.
- Astronomers Detect a Possible Signature of Life on a Distant Planet – Further studies are needed to determine whether K2-18b, which orbits a star 120 light-years away, is inhabited, or even habitable.
- A repeated analysis of the exoplanet’s atmosphere suggests an abundance of a molecule that on Earth has only one known source: living organisms such as marine algae.
Have you ever wondered how astronomers learn what’s in a faraway planet’s atmosphere? Here’s your one-sentence answer: Gases appear as different colors through the various colors of light in a prism; that is, each gas in a planet’s atmosphere blocks specific colors of starlight. Here’s your more detailed explanation that I learned from watching a couple of episodes of the rebooted Cosmos.
Each gas absorbs very specific wavelengths of light, like taking tiny, precise “bites” out of the spectrum.For example, if you pass sunlight through a prism, you see all the colors of the rainbow smoothly changing from red to violet. But if that same light passes through a gas first, the gas will absorb very specific wavelengths, causing thin dark lines to appear in certain spots of the rainbow spectrum.
These absorption lines are like fingerprints – hydrogen absorbs different specific wavelengths than oxygen, which absorbs different wavelengths than carbon dioxide, and so on. Each gas has its own unique pattern of these dark lines.
So when astronomers look at starlight that has passed through a planet’s atmosphere, they don’t just see “the color blue” and think “that must be water.” Instead, they see specific patterns of these thin dark lines in the spectrum and can match these patterns to known gases.
She briefly explains it here and has some other fun info on the subject to share.
- A repeated analysis of the exoplanet’s atmosphere suggests an abundance of a molecule that on Earth has only one known source: living organisms such as marine algae.
- White House Says It Has Tech That Can ‘Manipulate Time and Space’I suppose science has advanced rapidly since Trump returned to office. I found this on the White House website.
- How long has McDonald’s sold steak with breakfast meals and sandwiches? This was news to me. I usually keep up with this sort of stuff. I tried asking the drive-thru employee how long they had been selling them, but she just shot me a confused look and tapped a fellow employee, as she didn’t speak English. After a chain of four, all for the same reason, I just smiled, waved goodbye, and drove off. How does it taste? Not bad, all jokes aside, about what you’d expect.
Of course, I had to conduct a little research, and here’s what I found.
- This Texas charter school superintendent makes $870,000. He leads a district with 1,000 students. –
- Chinese diplomat trolls White House press secretary over fashion choice while tensions rise over tariffs
