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Corey S. Powell Profile picture
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Aug 10 • 3 tweets • 2 min read
The Perseid meteor shower peaks tomorrow night. It's caused by dust shed from Comet Swift-Tuttle; this is what the debris trail looks like as it orbits the Sun & intersects with Earth. meteorshowers.org/view/Perseids #PerseidMeteorShower
Every meteor shower has its own signature style. The Geminid shower (December 14) is caused by fast-moving pieces from the Sun-hugging asteroid Phaethon. meteorshowers.org/view/Geminids
This year's #PerseidMeteorShower unfortunately coincides with a bright full Moon. But with the right techniques, you can still catch some dramatic shooting stars. amsmeteors.org/2022/08/viewin…

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More from @coreyspowell

Corey S. Powell Profile picture
Aug 1
Twitter is full of "wonder science" accounts, many of them full of stolen images & misinformation. The recent viral tweet about the alleged void in space offers a good case study in how to spot the fakes. 1/5
Test #1: Who is sending the tweet? Reputable researchers, journalists, and institutions identify themselves. If the account is anonymous and contains no information, you should be suspicious. 2/5
Test #2: What is the source of the information? If there is no source/link (or a generic ID like "NASA"), that's a red flag. It's also a common tactic in bot accounts that scrape or steal images from the actual creators. 3/5
Read 7 tweets
Corey S. Powell Profile picture
Feb 4
The true colors of the solar system, a short thread. * First, let's start with the Sun. Can we all agree it's white to the eye?

* inspired by James O’Donoghue & Marina Koren, with some color corrections by me.
Mercury is so gray that it's tough to tell whether you are seeing pictures of it in color or black-and-white. This one is true color, seriously. blogs.agu.org/wildwildscienc…
Venus reflects 70% of the sunlight that hits it, nearly as reflective as freshly fallen snow. So yeah, it is super-white, as you can tell just by looking at it in the sky. nasa.gov/mission_pages/…
Read 13 tweets
Corey S. Powell Profile picture
Jan 7
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!
Read 4 tweets
Corey S. Powell Profile picture
Mar 5, 2020
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
Read 9 tweets
Corey S. Powell Profile picture
Jun 14, 2019
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…
Read 6 tweets

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