© 2024
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Strange Universe: Venus at its Best 3/26/23

The vernal equinox is here! The equinox is when every place on earth rotates perpendicularly into our planet's day/night line, the terminator. As a result, the sun rises precisely due east and sets exactly in the west. So it's the easiest day to find the exact cardinal compass directions from your home, or out any window.

Related Content
  • Get ready for the spring equinox! Tune in to hear how sunlight grows at its maximum possible rate this week and what an equinox actually is.
  • It’s a half century since James Lovelock originated the Gaia Hypothesis – which says that our planet’s biosphere is a single intelligent entity that self-regulates conditions for the mutual benefit of all. Hear how physicists have been heading down this path for a long time and about the alternative: The universe was created from nothing.
  • To the ancient Greeks the sky was crammed with mythological figures. Few resembled the people or animals they were supposed to portray. But the Greeks were gifted essay-test-takers who could fill in the blanks with the best of them, and they knew observers could always recognize a star’s brilliance. So a man named Hipparchus who lived on Rhodes devised a scheme for sorting out star brightness. Tune in to hear how his system, still in use today, assigned each star one of six different magnitudes.