ABOUT 250 YEARS AGO, MATHEMATICIANS wrote the first equations describing where the James Webb Space Telescope, launched on Christmas Day 2021, now resides. Webb will stay put for around 20 years at its cosmic parking spot, surveying the universe's galaxies. And we don't have to worry about it wandering away: Its new home is a gravitationally balanced spot relative to Earth and the sun, called a Lagrange point.
Webb experiences the pull of gravity from both our own planet and the sun at Lagrange point 2 (L2), one of five such points in the sun-Earth system. Centripetal force-which makes objects move in a circle around an object with gravity also accelerates the telescope into orbit with that system, causing it to revolve around, and get pulled toward, L2. Space explorers love Lagrange points because when viewed from Earth, the points appear to stay in fixed locations, making them convenient for communicating with spacecraft.
In the 18th century, mathematicians pinpointed the five Lagrange points that rule the motion of satellites like Webb; it was an exercise in understanding the motions of a two-body system like Earth and the moon. But Lagrangian math must account for the motions of three bodies based on their gravitational attractions, initial positions, and velocities.
There's an infinite number of solutions to this three-body problem, says astrophysicist Neil Cornish, who studies gravitational waves at Montana State University in Bozeman, Montana, and wrote an explanation of Lagrange points for NASA.
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Henrietta Lacks - It's not surprising that Henrietta Lacks-whose
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Dante Lauretta sat in the backseat of a helicopter hovering high above a remote patch of Utah desert, waiting for a small, twinkling speck in the sky to plunge toward earth.If you didn't know better, you might think what was beginning to burn through the skies above the American southwest in the early hours of September 24, 2023, was a shooting star. But it wasn't a shooting star. Or a meteor. It was a dishwasher-size capsule filled with bits of ancient asteroid-priceless matter from the dawn of the solar system. In other words, it was a treasure chest moving at 27,000 miles per hour and sizzling at a temperature half that of the sun's surface.
Whether We Live in a Simulation - scientist Melvin Vopson, PhD, studies this exact thing- the possibility that the universe might indeed be a digital facsimile. And he claims to have evidence.
In the 1999 film the Matrix, Neo discovers A truth to end all truths-the universe is a simulation. While this premise provides fantastic sci-fi fodder, the idea isn't quite as relegated to the fiction section as one might expect. . In fact, University of Portsmouth scientist Melvin Vopson, PhD, studies this exact thing- the possibility that the universe might indeed be a digital facsimile. And he claims to have evidence.
The Ancient Language of Easter Island - Today, humans inhabit- or have, at the very least, explored- pretty much every corner of the planet. But that immense proliferation of Homo sapiens across the globe was a slow process.
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Underwater UFOs - A retired U.S. Navy admiral believes that the government should look to the oceans to help solve a mystery in the skies.
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