Near-Earth Objects are comets and asteroids that have been pushed by the gravitational attraction of nearby planets into orbits that allow them to enter the Earth's neighborhood. They are about 4.5 billion years and can range in size from pebbles or lumps of ice, to rocky or icy worlds nearly 1,000...

Space Rock . Eros Eros is an asteroid but can be called a minor planet. It orbits the sun that sometimes causes it to closely pass as 14,000,000 miles next to Earth. Scientists believe that Eros comes this close to Earth every 31 years. The last time Eros came close to Earth was back in 19...

Issue: What is a comet made up of? View of Aristotelian Philosophers: The Aristotelian philosophers decided that comets were disasters that happened in the atmosphere of the earth. Comets were not permanent in the atmosphere. Since they appeared and disappeared, the comets "fuzzy-glow"...

Day after day, we wake up and find ourselves surrounded by life. Most of us encounter life in the human form; when we go to school, to work or to the supermarket. Other times we run into different forms of life, that do not take the human form, and that do not live in the same environment humans liv...

Pluto Ninety three years ago an astrologer noticed slight variations in the orbit of the planet Uranus.Then the search began for a ninth planet.Twenty five years later a startling discovery was made. The year was nineteen thirty when Clyde William Tombaugh had discovered a ninth planet be...

What is the shape of the universe? Brahe's model of the universe can be explained best with this model below. (p.409, Dictionary of Scientific Biography) In this model, Brahe describes the universe with the earth at the center. The sun orbits the earth while the other planets revolv...

An asteroid is a small or minor planets that are members of the solar system and move in elliptical orbits. Usually found between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. A comet is relatively small, rocky, and icy. It revolves around the sun. When a comet passes close to the sun some of the ice turns to...

Galileo "Since (as I believe) the opinion of Copernicus that Venus revolves about the sun is correct, it is clear that she would necessarily be seen by us sometimes horned and sometimes not, although the said planet is at equal distances from the Sun, at those times, that is, when the s...

Asteroids are objects in outter space that orbit the sun, but aren't quite large enough to be considered planets. Some scientists refer to them as "minor planets" while others call them "planetoids". They are made up of rocky and metallic materials. They come in many shapes, from round to ...

Jessica Alcalde Earth and Space Saturn SATURN Saturn is the sixth planet from the sun and it is the second largest of the nine planets in the solar system. In Roman mythology it was believed to be the god of agriculture, he ate his children. Its Greek name is Cronos. Saturn is ...

Ancient times have it that a group of people of heritage called the "Sumerians" has documented information about a planet that's beyond Pluto in our solar system in a different orbit. They have it documented as the 12th planet because they counted Earth's moon as a planet and als...

Jupiter is one of the Sun's most interesting planets. Jupiter has many intriguing properties, which differ from those of Earth and other planets. It has many satellites uncommon to others in the solar system. It even helps to sustain life on Earth. Jupiter may seem like an ordinary planet,...

Jesica Peratt 10 – 7 -99 Do Green Martians Really Exist? Do you ever wonder if there is life on other planets? I'm referring to little green bodies walking around with six eyes, two heads, and drool escalating from their mouths. As a child I use to lye in bed and imagine things like ...

The solar system was thought to have formed with the collapse of a giant gas cloud. The giant gas cloud was thought to have been spherical in shape because like everything else in the universe, it was spinning. This was probably due to the fact that the gas it was made up with came from the stars wh...

One of the big problems not fully appreciated with current ideas in nano technology research is the energy requirement for the development of shuttles and using it to carry the bots to other planets. First of all, the design of the shuttle would have to be very intricate because it would have to be ...

Extraterrestrial life As biologists learn about life on Earth in all its diversity, and at the rate that new planets are being discovered the search for life elsewhere grows more steadily pressing. We have discovered organisms on the Earth that seem tenacious and tough almost to a fault; they t...

Less than one-third the mass of Jupiter, Saturn is still an enormous planet. Saturn has a mass of about 95 Earths and has a very rapid rotation rate. Because its rotation rate is so rapid, it has an obvious oblateness. This oblateness is caused by a outward push at the middle, from the spin rate, ca...

The view on how astronomers once thought that the planets in universe formed is beginning to change. Astronomers once thought the guest giant plants formed slowly. Gravity pulled debris together to form rocky cores several times a mass of the Earth, the largest of these sweeping up vast amounts of g...

Hypotheses ranging from a black hole to a falling UFO have been offered, but scientists have narrowed the field down to asteroids and comets. The debate whether the strike was an asteroid or comet is ongoing today. Scientists did not venture to Tunguska for another 19 years. They anxiously search...

Wallace and Galilei; Heroes or Zeroes? In the play Galileo by Bertolt Brecht, the main character Galileo Galilei, is forced to recant and turn on his ideals for the sake of his life. The little monk warned Galileo before he divulged his findings, that they could be disastrous to the metaphysical ...