Remember the "mystery hut" spotted by China's Yutu-2 rover on the far side of the Moon? Now we've seen it up close. Behold...a Moon rock. mp.weixin.qq.com/s/VgtehRidYL8-…
Reminder: When you apply a lot of imagination to an image at the very edge of resolution, you're going to "see" all kinds of strange things. The Face on Mars was a classic of this genre.
Fortunately, the universe is full of genuine mysteries. We still don't know for sure whether there is life on Mars!
And to be fair, Pizza Hut is often a letdown when seen up close, too.
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I see versions of this nonsense claim all the time. This one went hugely viral. So let's dig into the actual numbers, cars versus volcanoes. (1/x)
Human activities released 33 billion tons of CO2 in 2019. About 16% of that, or 5 billion tons, is associated with road transportation. iea.org/articles/globa…
Calculating "every car in history" isn't easy, since car use has grown enormously over the past 120 years. Being extremely conservative, the total is 20 times this year's amount, or 100 billion tons. 3/x
30 years ago, nobody knew for sure whether there were ANY planets around other stars. Today the number of confirmed planets just passed 4,000--and the variety out there is staggering. [a short thread]
A sweeping new paper (341 pages!) analyzes 426 nearby red dwarf stars. They seem to average at least 3 planets each, which translates to more than a trillion planets in the Milky Way, over 100 billion of them potentially habitable. arxiv.org/abs/1906.04644
The Gemini Planet Imager is surveying 531 bright, nearby stars. It takes direct images of their planets, showing that Jupiter-like planets are common around the types of stars that light up the night sky. news.berkeley.edu/2019/06/12/jup…