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MAY DAY May Day ushers in a traditional celebration of flowers and spring. In many ancient calendars, May 1 welcomed the first day of summer, which was truly a cause for celebration. #MAYDAY May Day has been a traditional day of celebration for centuries, with some of the earliest appearing in pre-Christian times. One of the more popular rituals was harvesting flowers and giving them to neighbors and strangers in cone-shaped baskets. These May Baskets become more commonly known as May Day Baskets. The current tradition is observed by hanging a cone-shaped basket full of flowers or other gifts on...

This earlier report had reminded me of Popeye, especially because Purim falls around the same time, sometimes even on Saint Patrick's Day. So much green:The parade was plagued last year by public drinking, violence, assaults, overcrowding, and disorderly conduct, officials said.South Boston St. Patrick's Day parade will start earlier to help curb drunkenness, violenceIt doesn't happen very often, but one such date merge occurred in 1946, the very year specified by the Nazi shortly before he was hanged."Purimfest 1946!"It's an infamous quote related to the "Purim Code" in chapter 9 of the Megillah.Here's a critique, but it provides the basic...

The "demoted" dwarf planet Pluto and its largest moon Charon make an unusual pair, and for decades, scientists have been discussing how the binary system—in which each mutually orbits the other—came to be. With Charon being half Pluto's size, experts have struggled to explain how it ended up in the dwarf planet's domain.Now, a team of researchers has suggested that Pluto may have secured Charon through a newly described "kiss and capture" mechanism... Their work was published on Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience.The new theory suggests that billions of years ago, Pluto and Charon collided in the far reaches...

Explanation: The night side of Pluto spans this shadowy scene. In the stunning spacebased perspective the Sun is 4.9 billion kilometers (almost 4.5 light-hours) behind the dim and distant world. It was captured by far flung New Horizons in July of 2015 when the spacecraft was at a range of some 21,000 kilometers from Pluto, about 19 minutes after its closest approach. A denizen of the Kuiper Belt in dramatic silhouette, the image also reveals Pluto's tenuous, surprisingly complex layers of hazy atmosphere. Near the top of the frame the crescent twilight landscape includes southern areas of nitrogen ice plains...

Unravel the cosmic enigma with our latest video on the elusive "Planet Nine"! Join the quest as astronomers explore gravitational hints, peculiar orbits, and groundbreaking techniques in the relentless search.Are We about to Discover a New Planet in Our Solar System? | 21:46Astrographics | 44.6K subscribers | 329,973 views | February 7, 2024

Explanation: What color is Pluto, really? It took some effort to figure out. Even given all of the images sent back to Earth when the robotic New Horizons spacecraft sped past Pluto in 2015, processing these multi-spectral frames to approximate what the human eye would see was challenging. The result featured here, released three years after the raw data was acquired by New Horizons, is the highest resolution true color image of Pluto ever taken. Visible in the image is the light-colored, heart-shaped, Tombaugh Regio, with the unexpectedly smooth Sputnik Planitia, made of frozen nitrogen, filling its western lobe. New...

A planet is a planet wherever it resides, right? Dave Eicher examines the case of the icy world.In 1930 a young astronomer from Kansas, employed as an observer at Lowell Observatory in Arizona, discovered Pluto. It was the first planet in the solar system to have been discovered since 1846, when astronomers in Germany detected Neptune. Clyde Tombaugh, just 24 at the time, was hailed as a hero, Disney named a cartoon dog after the new planet, and for 76 years the solar system was a happy place. And then, in 2006, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) reconsidered Pluto’s status....

While scientists know that Pluto, like Earth, flipped on its side sometime in its past, Pluto's orientation before the flip and the degree to which it reoriented itself has not been well understood. Scientists who use New Horizons data to study Pluto's geologic past hope to find clues that explain this event. Now, a group of researchers has attributed Pluto's flip to the formation of Sputnik Planitia, a 620-mile-wide (1,000 km) basin that makes up half of the iconic heart-shaped region on Pluto. Researchers previously knew that Sputnik, which is filled with nitrogen ice, played a profound role in realigning...

Good evening fellow Freepers. I just got me a Roku device and I'm looking for suggestions for what I should add to my channel lineup. I got some already, but I'm looking for more conservative news channels as well as family friendly movie/TV channels to subscribe to. Thanks all!

JANUARY 17, 2015 Ted Cruz and the Ice Giants Senator Ted Cruz now oversees NASA, and that’s a very good thing.By Josh Gelernter Neptune, photographed by Voyager 2 in 1989. (NASA)With the GOP in charge of the Senate, Ted Cruz has taken charge of the Science, Space, and Competitiveness subcommittee. Which means Ted Cruz now oversees NASA. On Wednesday, Cruz issued a statement saying that “Our space program marks the frontier of future technologies for defense, communications, transportation and more, and our mindset should be focused on NASA’s primary mission: exploring space and developing the wealth of new technologies that...

Pluto is a dwarf planet. A dwarf planet travels around, or orbits, the sun just like other planets. But it is much smaller. Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto in 1930. He was an astronomer from the United States. An astronomer is a scientist who studies stars and other objects in space. Venetia Burney named Pluto that same year. She was an 11-year-old girl from England. Pluto is not very big. It is only half as wide as the United States. Pluto is smaller than Earth's moon. This dwarf planet takes 248 Earth years to go around the sun. If you lived...

I have carried out a search for Planet 9 in the IRAS data. At the distance range proposed for Planet 9, the signature would be a 60 micron unidentified IRAS point source with an associated nearby source from the IRAS Reject File of sources which received only a single hours-confirmed (HCON) detection. The confirmed source should be detected on the first two HCON passes, but not on the third, while the single HCON should be detected only on the third HCON. I have examined the unidentified sources in three IRAS 60micron catalogues: some can be identified with 2MASS galaxies, Galactic...

Scientists have debated the existence of Planet Nine since it was first introduced several years ago, but a new study has determined the orbit of the alleged celestial object. Caltech researchers Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin have plotted the orbital path of the mystical planet, which has yet to be discovered. In a blog post, Brown detailed that the 'highest probability' of Planet Nine's location is near aphelion - the point at which it is furthest from the sun - around 60 degrees in Right Ascension, 'pretty close to the galactic plane.' If in fact Planet Nine were at the...

Neptune's largest moon, Triton, was originally a member of a duo orbiting the Sun but was kidnapped during a close encounter with Neptune, a new model suggests. Triton is unique among large moons in that it orbits Neptune in a direction opposite to the planet's rotation, which long ago led scientists to speculate that the moon originally orbited the Sun. But until now, no convincing theory for how Triton paired with Neptune existed. Gravity might have pulled Triton away from its companion to make it an orbiting satellite of Neptune, researchers report in a new study published in the May...

The planets of the outer Solar System are known for being strange, as are their many moons. This is especially true of Triton, Neptune’s largest moon. In addition to being the seventh-largest moon in the Solar System, it is also the only major moon that has a retrograde orbit – i.e. it revolves in the direction opposite to the planet’s rotation. This suggests that Triton did not form in orbit around Neptune, but is a cosmic visitor that passed by one day and decided to stay. ... Triton has a radius, density (2.061 g/cm3), temperature and chemical composition similar to...

Neptune’s moons are ...all are named for gods of the sea, or for the children of Poseidon (which include Triton, Proteus, Depsina and Thalassa), minor Greek water dieties (Naiad and Nereid) or Nereids , the water nymphs in Greek mythology (Halimede, Galatea, Neso, Sao, Laomedeia and Psamathe). Neptune’s Regular Moons are those located closest to the planet and which follow circular prograde orbits that lie in the planet’s equatorial plane. They are, in order of distance from Neptune: Naiad , Thalassa , Despina, Galatea, Larissa , S/2004 N 1, and Proteus. All but the outer two are within Neptune-synchronous orbit......

(NASA/JPL-Caltech) ================================================================================= Life isn't always easy for astrophysicists: just when they've figured out another aspect of the patterns of movement in our Solar System, along come two of the moons of Neptune to mess everything up. The two moons in question are Naiad and Thalassa, both around 100 kilometres or 62 miles wide, which race around their planet in what NASA researchers are calling a "dance of avoidance". Their strange orbit was first detected by NASA researchers in November 2019. Compared with Thalassa, Naiad's orbit is tilted by about five degrees – it spends half of its time above Thalassa...

Pluto as seen from data taken by New Horizon’s flyby in 2015 of the dwarf planet, with a close-up view of the Pigafetta Montes mountain range. The colorization on the right indicates the concentrations of methane ice, with the highest concentrations at higher elevations in red, decreasing downslope to the lowest concentrations in blue. Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI and Ames Research Center/Daniel Rutter ============================================================================= The mountains discovered on Pluto during the New Horizons spacecraft’s flyby of the dwarf planet in 2015 are covered by a blanket of methane ice, creating bright deposits strikingly like the snow-capped mountain chains found on Earth. New...

Uranus, far from Earth in the darker region of the Solar System's planetary reach, isn't alone. It's accompanied by a retinue of moons - 27, to be precise. Far and dim, these moons are difficult to study, but astronomers have made an accidental discovery while observing Uranus. According to infrared images of the five main moons of Uranus, their composition is closer to that of dwarf planets like Pluto and Haumea - compact, rocky objects with an icy crust - than the more fluffy composition of the smaller Uranian moons. Uranus orbits the Sun at an average distance around 20...

A new paper describes how the researchers connected the moving dots to find the new TNOs, and also says this new approach could help look for the hypothetical Planet Nine and other undiscovered worlds. The Dark Energy Survey (DES) is designed to probe the origin of the accelerating universe and help uncover the nature of dark energy by measuring the 14-billion-year history of cosmic expansion with high precision. It studies galaxies and supernovas and precisely tracks their movements. This survey has been active since 2013, using the 4-meter Blanco Telescope located at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in Chile. The...