Experimental Blog #122

Quotes and Notes from "Heaven's Touch" - From Killer Stars to the Seeds of Life, How We Are Connected to the Universe by James B. Kaler

"Among the most amazing discoveries of modern astronomy is that even our day-to-day affairs are in fact subject to the vageries of distant planets and stars."
Photons have no mass; "they are the only particles that do not." So, only they can travel at the speed of light, where everything else would have infinite mass, which is impossible.
The most distant thing the unaided human eye can see is the Andromeda Galaxy, two and a half million light-years away.
The Earth's communications and high-orbit research satelites might be 22,250 or more miles from the center of the Earth, and are beyond the Earth's magnetic protection; and their sensitive electronics must sometimes be turned off to prevent hundreds of millions of dollars of damage from solar particle bombardment.

Kepler's and Newton's laws and equations apparently provide the basis to determine the masses of everything in the universe.
There are millions, maybe billions, of asteroids. Most of them are the size of large rocks, but there might be a million or more that are larger than 50 miles in diameter.
"Nearly 100 meteorites have been identified as coming from the Moon." "We find Martian meteorites as well, about three dozen known."
In 2006, the "Stardust" spacecraft, which was launched in 1999, brought back samples from "Comet Wild 2". In 2005 the "Deep Impact" spacecraft visited "Comet Temple 1".
"the gift of water was given to us by the accretion of hoards of leftover comets that hit us, each sent inward by the outer planets...."
Almost all of the three light elements, boron, lithium, and beryllium, are the products of cosmic ray collisions with carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen; and so is carbon 14, at least until the atom bomb testing of the 1940s and 1950s.
The author includes an all-sky map of the Cosmic Background Radiation, which was released a half million years after the Big Bang, and says it is the oldest thing that we know. Apparently, whatever precedes is theory.