Looking Up Guy

This Is How, 100 Years Ago, A Solar Eclipse Proved Einstein Right And Newton Wrong

“Today, May 29, 2019, marks the 100th anniversary of the day, the event, and the expedition that validated Einstein’s General Relativity as humanity’s leading theory of how gravitation works. Newton’s laws are still incredibly useful, but only as an approximation to Einstein’s theory with a limited range of validity.

General Relativity, meanwhile, has gone on to successfully predict everything from frame-dragging to gravitational waves, and still has yet to encounter an observation that conflicts with its predictions. Today marks a full century of General Relativity’s demonstrated validity, with not even a hint of how it might someday break down. Although we certainly don’t know everything about the Universe, including what a quantum theory of gravity might actually be like, today is a day for celebrating what we do know. 100 years after our first critical test, our best theory of gravity still shows no signs of slowing down.”

Happy 100th anniversary to the critical observations that demonstrated Einstein was right and Newton was wrong when it came to gravitation. There’s an incredible story to how this all occurred, and you won’t want to miss a drop of what it all means.

This Is Why Mars Is Red And Dead While Earth Is Blue And Alive

“Both Mars and Earth had early atmospheres that were heavy, massive, and extraordinarily rich in CO2. While Earth’s carbon dioxide got absorbed into the oceans and locked up into carbonate rocks, Mars was unable to do the same, as its oceans were too acidified. The presence of sulfur dioxide led to Martian oceans that were rich in sulfuric acid. This led to geology of Mars we’ve discovered with rovers and landers, and pointed to a different cause — the solar wind — as the culprit in the mystery of the missing Martian atmosphere.

Thanks to NASA’s MAVEN mission, we’ve confirmed that this story is, in fact, the way it happened. Some four billion years ago, the core of Mars became inactive, its magnetic field disappeared, and the solar wind stripped the atmosphere away. With our magnetic field intact, our planet will remain blue and alive for the foreseeable future. But for a smaller world like Mars, its time ran out long ago. At last, we finally know why.”

For most of the 20th century, we knew that Earth had a carbon dioxide-rich past for its atmosphere, but that those atmospheric molecules were deposited into the ocean and precipitated or fossilized out as carbonate rocks like limestone and dolomite. We assumed that Mars, which once had a thick atmosphere and a water-rich surface, lost its atmosphere the same way. But landers and rovers changed all of that, discovering very little in the way of carbonate rocks, meaning that there must have been a different process at play to strip the Martian atmosphere away.