The FAS Astronomers Blog

  • Gravity

    FAS Astronomers Blog, Volume 32, Number 4. Objects fall to the ground. That’s the nature of things on the surface of the Earth, and everywhere else. Gravity is something that humankind has been familiar with since ancient times. Drop something and it falls to the floor. Jump up and you end up back on the…

  • You Don’t Need to Duck

    FAS Astronomers Blog, Volume 32, Number 3. Just recently, the folks at Live Science published a few articles about the risk of a dangerous asteroid hitting the Earth (see below). Is it time for us to start worrying? Have you heard of NEOs, PHAs, and PHOs? Well, these are Near-Earth Objects (NEOs), Potentially Hazardous Asteroids…

  • Cosmic Microwave Background

    FAS Astronomers Blog, Volume 32, Number 2. Just recently, it was reported in the news that Arno Penzias passed away at the age of 90. Penzias, along with his colleague Robert Wilson, discovered the birth of the universe.  In the 1940s, There wasn’t any direct evidence of the so-called Big Bang that many astronomers believed…

  • The Daytime Moon

    FAS Astronomers Blog, Volume 32, Number 1. One of our favorite observation targets is the Moon. Most of the time, we observe it at night. Interestingly, the best time to see features on the Moon isn’t during a full moon – it is much too bright, but during a first or third quarter when you…

  • Asteroid 1, Dinosaurs 0

    FAS Astronomers Blog, Volume 31, Number 15. The dinosaurs ruled the Earth for millions of years. Despite their dominance, the dinosaurs disappeared. The commonly accepted theory is that a large asteroid hit the Earth, resulting in the extinction of over two thirds of the species on the planet. For more on dinosaurs, see three previous…

  • The Case of the Brontosaurus

    FAS Astronomers Blog, Volume 31, Number 14b. When I was growing up, Brontosaurus was almost as famous as T. rex. However, Othniel Marsh made a mistake (maybe). In 1877, he discovered a dinosaur, which he named Apatosaurus ajax (Marsh 1877). Two years later, in 1879, he discovered another similar dinosaur, which he named Brontosaurus excelsus…

  • The Case of the Velociraptor

    FAS Astronomers Blog, Volume 31, Number 14a. The dinosaur in the movie Jurassic Park, called Velociraptor, was modeled after another dinosaur named Deinonychus. I guess the movie name sounded scarier and it was probably easier to pronounce. Although, Gregory S. Paul classified Deinonychus as a species of Velociraptor in his 1998 book Predatory Dinosaurs of…

  • Meet The Dinosaurs

    FAS Astronomers Blog, Volume 31, Number 14. In this article, we’ll focus on several individual dinosaurs and tell you a little more about them. As noted in An Introduction to Dinosaurs and The Classification of Dinosaurs, not all dinosaurs are the same. They came in all sizes and shapes. Some were meat-eaters (carnivores) and some…

  • The Classification of Dinosaurs

    FAS Astronomers Blog, Volume 31, Number 13. As noted in An Introduction to Dinosaurs, Richard Owen (Owen 1842) created the designation Dinosauria meaning “Fearfully great lizards” or “terrible lizards” to describe the new found dinosaurs. Dinosaurs lived during the Mesozoic era and dominated the planet in the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. In 1887, Harry Seeley…