Why did people think the Moon was made out of green cheese?

Why did people think the Moon was made out of green cheese?

space   11:22 PM

In fact, nobody really ever thought the Moon was made of green cheese… Well, there are nutters out there, so it’s possible that there was at least one person who thought the Moon was made of cheese, and kids used to sometimes believe the Moon was made of cheese thanks to various fables, but kids will believe anything. For instance, in 1902 it was found that the most common theory as to what the Moon was made of according to children in the United States was that it was made of cheese. But these children weren’t exactly setting the bar high as other popular responses from them were things like “yellow paper, dead people, and rags.”

So other than lunatics and children who were told so by their parents via fables, nobody seriously ever thought the Moon was made of cheese.

Another common misconception surrounding the Moon/green cheese thing is that the “green” here is referring to the color green.  While there are actually green cheeses, what the “green” signifies here is “new” or “fresh”, so “the Moon is made of new cheese.”  This was a common way to refer to cheese where the whey either hadn’t yet all been pressed out or had just been removed from the curds, in other words, cheese that has not been aged at all.

So how did this “Moon is made of green cheese” thing all start and become popularized?  It isn’t entirely clear who was the first to come up with the expression, but it became extremely common starting in the mid-16th century. The credit for the person to come up with the expression usually goes to famed French monk and scholar François Rabelais or English writer John Heywood.

Heywood first used it in The Proverbs of John Heywood written in 1546

Ye fetch circumquaques to make me believe,
Or thinke, that the moone is made of greene cheese.
And when ye have made me a lout in all these,
It seemeth ye would make me goe to bed at noone.

So basically, the expression itself simply was used to refer to something so ludicrous that only the extremely gullible would believe it.

Another early example using the statement in the same way can be found in 1565 in Shacklock’s Hatched of Heresies:

Whilst they tell for truthe Luther his lowde lyes, so that they may make theyr blinde brotherhode and the ignorant sort beleve that the mone is made of grene chese

Yet another early reference from John Wilkins’ New World Book 1 (1638), which is explicitly clear as to the meaning of the expression and that it had become common,

You may as soon persuade some Country Peasants that the Moon is made of Green Cheese (as we say) as that ’tis bigger than his Cart-wheel

While in the early days it was used just to signify gullibility, in the last couple centuries many started thinking that people actually used to believe this, which is kind of ironic if you think about it.  This is not unlike how people started believing that most thought the world was flat during the Middle Ages, when in truth in many parts of the world people have known the world wasn’t flat for well over 2000 years.

For instance, Eratosthenes (at the time the head librarian at the library of Alexandria) around 240 BC not only knew the Earth was round, as most Greek scholars did at the time, but managed to become the first known person to calculate the circumference of the Earth accurately, only off by about 2%.  He also calculated the distance from the Earth to the Sun and was off by only about a half a percent.  Not only that, but he calculated the tilt of the Earth on its axis and was off by less than half a degree.  Another amazing accomplishment by Eratosthenes was that he basically invented the discipline of Geography with his remarkable three book treaties Geographikia.  You can learn more about all this here: The Amazing Eratosthenes

The Astronauts on the International Space Station Witness Around 15 Sunrises

The Astronauts on the International Space Station Witness Around 15 Sunrises

space   12:01 AM

The International Space Station orbits about 354 kilometers (220 miles) above the Earth and travels at approximately  27,700 km/hr (17,211 mph), so it takes about 92 minutes to circle the Earth once. For this reason, every 45 minutes the astronauts on-board see a sunrise or a sunset, with a total of 15 – 16 of each every 24 hours.

A space sunset is said to be a spectacular sight that shows in vivid detail the many layers of the Earth’s thin atmosphere. The first layer displays the dark part of the Earth experiencing night. Above that, in deep orange and yellow is the Earth’s troposphere, which contains almost all of the clouds in the sky. Then the pink to white region above the clouds which gradually turn to a light blue band, essentially the stratosphere, which is that part of the Earth’s atmosphere where airplanes fly.  The layer above the stratosphere appears as  a darker blue band that gradually fades away into the cold dark vacuum of outer space.

NASA Wants To Send Your Art And Poetry Out Of This World

NASA Wants To Send Your Art And Poetry Out Of This World

space   11:33 PM

Are you a creative person who wishes your personal expressions of originality and imagination could transcend the boundaries of time and space?

Well, NASA wants to help you achieve that lofty goal. Literally.

In September, NASA will launch its OSIRIS-REx spacecraft on the first U.S. mission to collect samples of an asteroid and return them to Earth for study. The public is invited to submit art work about what exploration means to them, which will be saved on a computer chip and stored on the spacecraft.

“Space exploration is an inherently creative activity,” Dante Lauretta, principal investigator for OSIRIS-REx at the University of Arizona in Tucson, said in a statement. “We are inviting the world to join us on this great adventure by placing their art work on the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, where it will stay in space for millennia.”

The spacecraft already carries a chip with more than 442,000 names that were submitted last year through NASA and The Planetary Society’s “Messages to Bennu“ campaign.

The target asteroid, Bennu, is named for an Egyptian deity associated with the sun and the creation of Earth. That’s apropos, as mission scientists hope the samples retrieved during the mission will provide important clues of how our solar system formed and evolved.

Bennu — which measures approximately 538 yards in diameter — passes close to Earth every six years, meaning it grazed us by about 22,000 miles in 2013.

How The Moon Was Formed

How The Moon Was Formed

space   4:58 AM

the moon isn’t as old as the Earth and was formed approximately 30–50 million years after the Solar System based on what is called ‘the giant impact theory’.

Although no one can say for sure exactly how our moon came to be, there a few hypothesis and theories of which the ‘the giant impact theory’ is the most compelling and widely accepted. In this theory, the Earth had no moon until it was struck by a rogue planet which instantly vaporized. The impact is said to have created a cloud that reached roughly 13,700 miles or 22,000 kilometers high, where it condensed into solid particles that orbited the Earth.  Over time they aggregated into larger moonlets, which eventually combined to form the moon we know today.

This theory is supported by quite a bit of evidence such as: even though the Earth has a large iron core and the moon does not, the moon has exactly the same oxygen isotope composition as the Earth, unlike other planets formed in other parts of the Solar System. This indicates the moon should have been formed from material in Earth’s neighborhood. Another significant piece of evidence comes from the oldest record of Earth’s ocean tides ever found, which were 3.2-billion-year-old rocks from South Africa. Pinstriped circular sand-and-silt layers in the rocks were deposited by daily, fortnightly and monthly tidal cycles. If the moon formed elsewhere, then was captured intact by Earth’s gravity as some theories state, the moon’s orbit would have been extremely elliptical and tidal rock layers would not have shown such normal cycles.

Computer simulations modeling a giant impact are consistent with measurements of the angular momentum of the Earth–Moon system, and the small size of the lunar core. They also show that most of the Moon came from the impactor planet and not from Earth. The post-impact mixing of the vaporized material between the forming Earth and Moon could have equalized their isotopic compositions, but this again is just speculation.

Moon Dust Smells Like Spent Gunpowder

Moon Dust Smells Like Spent Gunpowder

space   11:10 PM

Moon dust smells like spent gunpowder.  This is according to the astronauts that have had the opportunity to smell fresh Moon dust that had been tracked into the lunar module after excursions out on the surface of the Moon.

The astronauts didn’t just smell the dust though, they also touched and tasted it.  They say it feels like soft snow, though despite the softness is surprisingly abrasive, extremely clingy, and near impossible to brush off.  The taste apparently is also very similar to gunpowder, according to Apollo 16 astronaut Charlie Duke.

Interestingly, Moon dust and gunpowder aren’t similar at all in composition.  So why it should smell like this is a mystery; Moon dust doesn’t smell like anything once back on Earth.  Thus, this smell has not been able to be studied due to the fact that the seals were broken on the containers containing fresh Moon dust (dust that had not been exposed to moist air).  What caused the breaking of the seals was actually the unexpected abrasiveness of the Moon dust, which cut the seals.

There are two main theories as to why the Moon dust smells like this when it first comes in contact with moist air.  First, perhaps we are seeing the “desert rain” effect.  This is where the completely moisture free dust comes in contact with the moist air in the lunar module.  This releases odors from the dust that have lain dormant for untold years.  The second theory is that there is some sort of oxidation taking place.  Oxidation is very similar to burning, but without the smoke as it happens too slowly.  So this might produce this burning gunpowder smell.

The Moon dust itself is made up of primarily silicon dioxide glass that has been shattered into tiny pieces.  There is also quite a bit of iron, calcium, and magnesium.

The Sun is White, Not Yellow

The Sun is White, Not Yellow

space   2:55 AM

the Sun is white, not yellow.

For you graphics people or web developers out there, the exact color of the sun is #fff5f2.  The reason the Sun looks yellow to us on Earth is that our atmosphere scatters light from the Sun; so the apparent color of the sun changes.  This same scattering effect iswhy the sky looks blue in the day time instead of black, like at night.

Specifically, what is going on here is the Earth’s atmosphere scatters light in the blue and violet wavelength range, so the remaining wavelengths of light appear yellow.  This same effect is why the sky will also often appear yellow when the Sun is disappearing over the horizon, as well as why the sky/Sun can appear more red at times during this phase of the day.

As the sun is setting, more of the shorter wavelength blue is being scattered because of the decreased angle of the sun relative to you; thus the light has to pass through more atmosphere to get to you.  This increased diffusion results in less of the blue wavelength being visible to you and thus what remains appears yellow.  Similarly, if it is dusty or there are a lot of other larger particles in the air, this will filter out larger wavelengths, resulting in a red sky and red sun.

Mysterious Images of Mars

Mysterious Images of Mars

space   3:44 AM

Morning frost

This false-color photo was taken by the Mars Phoenix Lander on Aug. 14, 2008. Soon after the photo was taken, the frost disappeared from the heat of the rising sun. Mars has a gravitational pull that is about 38 percent that of Earth's, though Earth is about 10 times more massive than Mars. There is no evidence that the planet has magnetic poles now, but there are indications that they once existed.

Barsoom

Mars maintains a bright red-orange hue because of the rust-colored, iron-rich minerals in the soil. This landscape is named from the 1913 science-fiction classic, "The Gods of Mars." Barsoom was the local name for the red planet. This photo was taken by the Mars Rover Spirit as it wintered on a small hill known as Low Ridge.

Proctor Crater

This is another snapshot from the HiRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Taken on Feb. 9, 2009, this image shows dunes and ripples in the sand. Experts speculate that the dunes are composed of basaltic sand, which comes from volcanic rock, thus making them darker than the surrounding sand ripples.