Explaining Science
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I have a PhD in astronomy from the University of Manchester in the North West of England. Explaining Science contains articles on astronomy, space, and space travel - written at a level which is easily accessible to the non-scientist but without being dumbed down. Check the posts now!
Explaining Science
1M ago
The night of 12/13 August will be the peak of the Perseids, one of the most famous prolific meteor showers. Meteors (also known as shooting stars) are bright streaks of light caused by small lumps of rock or metal called meteoroids hitting the Earth’s atmosphere at very high speed (in the case of the Perseids around 200,000 km/h ..read more
Explaining Science
1M ago
Next Thursday, July 25, is one of the four days a year in which the length of the solar day, the natural day measured by the rising and setting of the Sun, is 24 hours. I have written about this in previous posts but I thought it be worth mentioning it again because it ..read more
Explaining Science
2M ago
Back in 2019, the year before the pandemic, many of you will have seen images of long ‘trains’ composed of up to sixty SpaceX Starlink satellites crossing the sky in a straight line. These pictures hit the headlines not only because of the number of satellites, but because of their brightness. A 'train' of ..read more
Explaining Science
3M ago
As most people with an interest in astronomy know, Sirius is the brightest star in the night sky - easily outshining all other stars. The apparent brightness of a star depends on two factors: how luminous it is (its intrinsic brightness) and how far away it is. Sirius is a bright star, 25.5 times more ..read more
Explaining Science
5M ago
Doesn't time fly ! ? Ten years have passed since I wrote my first post on my Explaining Science blog (originally called The Science Geek). I have decided to mark the occasion by reblogging my first ever post. Over the last ten years the question whether there are primitive life forms on Saturn’s icy moon ..read more
Explaining Science
5M ago
Sometimes a video can convey a message better than a simple blog post and videos tend to reach a slightly different audience. I do get irritated by poor reporting of science topics in the mainstream media (maybe I am getting grumpy? ? ). So here’s a video about the errors in the article about the ..read more
Explaining Science
6M ago
This year, for the majority of the world’s Christians, March 31 is Easter Sunday, one of the most important dates in the calendar. Although Easter is the festival celebrating the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, it is also widely marked by non-Christians in the UK, particularly as there are two very welcome public holidays on the preceding ..read more
Explaining Science
7M ago
This post is a departure from my usual topics of astronomy and more general science. In 2020, I took a series of photos of my back garden. This year was, for those of us in the UK - like many countries in the world, the year of the lockdowns due to the covid pandemic. A ..read more
Explaining Science
8M ago
Like many of you, in December last year I followed with interest the news reports from COP28. As it concluded, there was much written in the media about whether the nations of the world would actually do what is needed to restrict the rise in average global temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Now ..read more
Explaining Science
9M ago
I am still surprised how many articles on otherwise reputable websites when writing about scientific topics are riddled with errors and have clearly been written by lazy journalists with no knowledge of the subject they’re talking about. One of the worst examples was an article on the December 2023 solstice which recently appeared on a ..read more