Rock Legends
The Asteroids and Their Discoverers
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34 Result(s)
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Book
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Ruled by the Planets
The orbits of asteroids are controlled by the gravitational pull of the major planets, which pull them together in groups or disperse them from forbidden zones.
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The Fate of Asteroids
What happens to asteroids in the future? Some will be flung from the solar system into the cold of interstellar space. Others will survive the evolution of the Sun though its red giant phase and be swallowed a...
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When the Stars Fell Down
Asteroids are orbiting rocks. Meteors are small dust particles or rocks, which impact on the Earth and burn up in the atmosphere. In some cases astronomers have tracked the direct connections between asteroids...
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The Chaos of the Solar System
Celestial mechanics is the mathematics of the orbits of asteroids and has a reputation for mathematical difficulty, accuracy and foresight. But recent discoveries have shown just how chaotic the orbits of the ...
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My Asteroid, My Book
Asteroids are undeveloped small planets or fragments of planets and constitute an astronomical rubbish heap of evidence about the past history of the solar system, just as an archaeological midden is evidence ...
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Finding Asteroids by Eye
The first asteroids were new planets, found at the start of a new century, viewed as inspiring, newly discovered lands. The discoveries stretched astronomers to implement new techniques and new ways of analysi...
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Naming and Possessing
Naming an asteroid is in some sense a way to possess it, even though asteroids are celestial objects far beyond any terrestrial control. The declaration of a name for an asteroid historically constituted a pub...
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At the Edge of the Solar System
In the twenty-first century, astronomers working with the most sensitive detectors and largest telescopes have developed big data sets from which they have unearthed faint, distant asteroids far beyond what we...
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Finding and Investigating Asteroids Using Technology
The first asteroids were found by chance, but astronomers implemented systematic methods to discover more of them, deploying newly developed detector, information technology, radar and space techniques.
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The Catalog and the Names It Inspires
Modern astronomers have set up controls to systematise data about asteroids and develop naming and cataloguing conventions.
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Filling the Gap
Most asteroids known orbit in the Main Belt, a gap between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. What is the gap? and why is it there?
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Book
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Landscapes on Other Worlds
In 1543, on his deathbed, the Polish cleric Nicholas Copernicus (1473–1543) published his idea that Earth orbited the Sun, not the other way around. Earth was a planet. It was thus like the other planets of th...
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The Volcanic Scenery of Venus and Io
Venus is the non-identical twin of Earth, the same size but very different in appearance. To the naked eye Venus is very bright. In a telescope Venus shows as a white globe. It is covered in white cloud. Any m...
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Cosmic Skyscapes
Conspiracy theories are about groups of people who are executing a coordinated secret plan to achieve some nefarious purpose, something important. On a scale of 1–100, where a conspiracy to achieve world domin...
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The Lakes of Titan
In January 2005, an electronic eye gazed on the fresh landscape of new land on a previously unexplored world. It saw a landscape that would, at first sight, have been familiar to many human eyes. The scenes th...
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Ice and Dust Fountains, Rock Piles
The surface of the Moon is dead, a landscape that, after the tumultuous and violent changes of an earlier bombardment, now changes very little and very gradually indeed. By contrast, the landscapes of comets a...
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Frost, Ice and Snow
Buzz Aldrin’s words as he gazed at the lunar landscape for the first time were “Magnificent desolation!” Surely the same words could be used to describe the icy wastes of Antarctica and the sea ice of the Nort...
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Representing Alien Landscapes
Landscape (noun)
