Cosmic Howlers
May 2023

The Earth’s core is far more than a few hundred kilometres below the surface! The ball-shaped core lies beneath the cool, brittle crust and the mostly solid mantle. The core is found about 2,900 km below the Earth’s surface.

One arcminute contains 60 arcseconds. The components of the binary star Zeta Aquarii actually have a separation of 1.7 arcseconds – that is sixty times smaller than stated!

The Perseid meteor shower doesn’t take a rest on the 11th – it  is visible from the 10th to 12th, with the peak of the meteor shower at that time…though, strictly speaking, Perseids can be seen from 7 July until 24 August.

One wrong letter makes all the difference here – adoptive should be adaptive!

Adaptive Optics is a technique that removes the atmospheric disturbance and allows a ground-based astronomical telescope to capture better images.  This is achieved by precisely deforming a mirror in order to compensate for light distortion.

The figure of 200,000 quoted is a bit high!  The heaviest star currently known is R136a1 in the Large Magellanic Cloud, with 265 times the Sun’s mass. It’s also the most luminous star known, being more than 7 million times the luminosity of our Sun.

For a long time, theories have suggested that no stars can be born by ordinary processes above 150 solar masses, so one idea for the formation of supermassive stars like R136a1 is that they form through mergers of multiple smaller stars.