Strange Universe

Tuesday night, December 13, we’ll see the year’s finest meteor shower. These are the Geminids, and they deliver a meteor a minute. And you start seeing them as early as 8 p.m. No need to wait for midnight like with those other rich showers. And the Moon will be absent, giving us perfect dark skies if you’re away from cities and artificial lights.

This is the week of Mars. Its opposition – when it’s exactly the opposite the sun in our sky – is this Thursday. Its closest and brightest happened a few days ago. And this Wednesday night, December 7th, it closely meets the Full Moon. We’ll also hear what Mars has been up to.

For the next month, Mars hovers at its closest to us, which it briefly does only every two years. Its closest approach happens the first day of December. But since Mars doesn’t change much from night to night, there’s no need to wait. You can go out the next clear evening. Mars is that super bright star low in the east at 7 p.m., with even brighter Jupiter far to its right. If you have a telescope also check out Saturn, the lowest star in the west.

Everyone knows the terms waxing and waning, and usually know a waxing Moon gets fatter each night while a waning Moon gets thinner. But relatively few of your friends could look at a moon and instantly tell whether it’s a waxing or a waning one. So let's make it easy. The waxing moon is lit up on the right. It's the moon you see during the weeks before full moon. It's also the moon that's already out when darkness falls, so it's the one seen by the most people. The dinnertime moon.

Lunar eclipses appear best through binoculars or just the naked eye. The full moon is never a good telescope target, and hosting Earth’s blurry-edged shadow doesn't help much. It's not terrible, like macaroni salad, but Earth's shadow edge is fuzzy, and fuzzy is not a good thing through a telescope.

The greatest sky experiences are often accompanied by excitement and shouts. But a lunar eclipse rarely creates such a reaction. So a realistic expectation of the eclipse next Monday night, November 7, might be “fascinating” rather than “mind-blowing.” Still, it’s very cool to see the Moon enter our planet's normally-invisible shadow. The shadow’s round shape proves we really live on a ball. And during totality almost everyone marvels at the Moon’s strange reddish color.

The third-most-common gas we breathe is Argon. Argon, the gas inside the round, hot light bulbs that used to be everywhere, was discovered by a Scot, William Ramsay, who eventually won the Nobel Prize for his work with gases. Tune in to hear what else Ramsay has discovered and its influence on shopping.

Many people are truly imaginative when it comes to thinking of alternatives to established cosmology models. One listener recently asked, “Could the expanding universe be caused by the emptiness on the outside sucking everything in its direction?” Hear countless possibilities offered by alternate universes on the nature of the cosmos.

We and Andromeda are approaching each other. With the separation decreasing by 70 miles each second, we'll collide in a few billion years. But no problem. We'll pass through each other without harm, and ultimately merge into an enormous new galaxy that's already been named: Milkomeda.

A neutron star forms when a massive star collapses to send supernova brilliance outward and a tiny remnant core imploding inward. That core — now a 12-mile-wide sun of its own — can spin hundreds of times a second, causing its magnetic field to wrap around itself, intensifying to a strength that be a thousand trillion times greater than Earth’s magnetic field. Such stars are now called magnetars.