NASA

It’s now a half century since James Lovelock originated the Gaia Hypothesis – which says that our planet’s biosphere is an intelligent entity that self-regulates conditions for the mutual benefit of all. Though many mainstream biologists hated it and still do, maybe Gaia doesn’t even go far enough. Why not the entire cosmos?

On Sunday night, Match 22, the strange planet Uranus will float to the left of the crescent Moon. Here’s where the fun begins. Uranus is green because its atmosphere has lots of methane, which absorbs the sun’s red light but reflects the green and blue to our eyes.Grab those binoculars you haven’t used in years and sweep them leftward of the Moon until you see a little green star. Since actual stars are never green, you’ll know you’ve found the seventh planet.

In sci-fi movies, a nerdy scientist might transport himself to another dimension. In popular fiction, to qualify as another dimension means a realm must be something beyond the four dimensions of everyday reality, and thus be totally inaccessible, like public restrooms in New York. But might they really exist?

We’ll get a lunar eclipse this Tuesday morning, and it’s generating a lot of buzz, especially since such eclipses have been dramatically called Blood Moons in recent years. That’s because the Moon turns reddish when the eclipse is total. In truth it’s actually a coppery hue, which isn’t really the color of blood unless there’s something very wrong with your hemoglobin.

For the next few evenings, Mercury is at its easiest to find of the entire year. And that’s really the idea – merely to have seen it at least once in your life.

Bob Berman discusses the first planet from the Sun and the smallest in the Solar System.

Bob talks of the trials and tribulations of space exploration and missions.

The winter solstice occurs on Sunday, December 21, around nightfall, when Earth’s south pole tilts most directly toward the Sun, giving the Northern Hemisphere its shortest day of the year; starting Monday, daylight increases slightly and the Sun climbs higher, bringing a hint of added warmth. The Sun rises and sets at its most extreme points along the horizon, and although often labeled the start of winter, that date is a human convention rather than a physical change. Astronomically, the solstice features the Sun’s most curved, rainbow-like path across the sky, reaching its lowest noon height of the year and producing the longest shadows.

On December 7 we get the year’s earliest sunset, followed by the shortest day on December 21 and the darkest morning in early January. This timing doesn’t match the solstice because Earth’s tilt and elliptical orbit make our solar day slightly longer than 24 hours as we move fastest near early January. That small shift moves sunrise and sunset milestones off the solstice, meaning the darkest-feeling afternoon of winter arrives now.

The universe is shaped by four fundamental forces, including gravity and electromagnetism. The latter’s strength is described by the dimensionless constant alpha (about 0.008), a value long puzzling to scientists such as Wolfgang Pauli. In 2010, astrophysicists analyzing quasar light found that alpha appeared slightly larger in one direction of the sky and smaller in the opposite, suggesting this supposedly unchanging constant might vary across the cosmos. Tune in to hear how such a directional shift would challenge Einstein’s relativity, hint at an even larger — possibly infinite — universe with fundamentally different cosmic “neighborhoods,” and suggest that life exists here partly because our region of the universe is unusually suited to it.