Since Jupiter is a gas planet, why can’t comets collide with Jupiter and pass right through it?
Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system, with a diameter of approximately 143,000 kilometers and a mass 318 times that of Earth. As a gas giant,…
How does the Earth orbit the sun without losing energy?
Physics is hard to understand because it violates everyday observation, intuition, and common sense. Take “Newton’s First Law” as an example. It states that an object in motion…
What would happen if we poured 1 billion liters of water on Mars?
So – let’s get this into cubic meters. A liter is 1/1000th of a cubic meter – so we’re talking about a million cubic meters – which would…
The drinking duck is a common science toy in American physics classrooms and elsewhere
When you wet its head, it slowly lowers until it suddenly becomes almost horizontal, then straightens up after a jolt or two. If you put a glass of…
If we can squeeze 1 terabyte into a MicroSD card, why don’t we have standard sized hard drives that can hold thousands of terabytes of data?
Here’s a 128GB microSD card with the lid off. That black rectangle is the actual flash memory chip. You could probably fit at least 40 of these on…
Pangaea: Will the continents on Earth once again form a “Pangea” millions of years from now?
For starters, Pangaea isn’t even the earliest supercontinent, only the most recent. Before Pangaea, was Pannotia. Before Pannotia, was Rodinia. Before Rodinia, was Columbia. And before Columbia, was…
What causes the Earth to vibrate at a frequency of 7.83Hz?
The vibration of Earth at a frequency of 7.83 Hz is known as Schumann resonance – named after the German physicist Otto Schumann (1888-1974), who predicted and mathematically described the…
How much would a cubic inch of a neutron star weigh? What would happen if it suddenly appeared on earth?
Neutron stars are made of neutronium which is neutrons packed shoulder to shoulder by intense gravity and has a density in the neighborhood of 10^17 Kg/m^3 which is…
If evolution is blind, shouldn’t there be organisms that evolved themselves into a dead end? Are there any examples of this?
You already have plenty of examples in other answers. Though no one mentioned the one closest to home: Neanderthals. But didn’t they evolve into us modern Sapiens? No….
Could planets with 99% oxygen exist in space?
We actually already have one of those! Though it’s a moon, not a planet. And it only qualifies because of a loophole. This is Europa. It’s a moon…