Astronomy Myths
More crimes occur at Full Moon.This myth ascribes more influence to the Moon than it actually has.
This legend is one most people have heard and many believe, although there's not a shred of proof that backs it up. The myth states that police officers and emergency room personnel note a rise in criminal activity during Full Moons.
Scientific studies, however, show no such correlation. In other words, the Moon's phase has no effect on the number of crimes committed, the number of people admitted to asylums, the number of babies conceived or born, or any other like occurrence.
So why does this myth persist? Perhaps it's because people seem to notice an increase in such events around a Full Moon. Social scientists speculate it's because people are more likely to notice, and remember, a Full Moon, rather than the Moon at other phases.
So, if someone commits a murder when the Moon is a crescent, people covering the crime may not remember the phase of the Moon that night. (Perhaps the Moon set before law enforcement arrived at the crime scene.) If, however, the Moon is full, a police officer might be more likely to remember the phase of the Moon that night, because a bright Moon is obvious. And here's a startling fact: A Full Moon shines 10 times brighter than a Quarter Moon, even though First Quarter and Last Quarter display half of the Moon's face illuminated.
In short, crimes, births, and strange occurrences happen all month long, but only those that occur around Full Moon cause people to talk about them.
Scientific studies, however, show no such correlation. In other words, the Moon's phase has no effect on the number of crimes committed, the number of people admitted to asylums, the number of babies conceived or born, or any other like occurrence.
So why does this myth persist? Perhaps it's because people seem to notice an increase in such events around a Full Moon. Social scientists speculate it's because people are more likely to notice, and remember, a Full Moon, rather than the Moon at other phases.
So, if someone commits a murder when the Moon is a crescent, people covering the crime may not remember the phase of the Moon that night. (Perhaps the Moon set before law enforcement arrived at the crime scene.) If, however, the Moon is full, a police officer might be more likely to remember the phase of the Moon that night, because a bright Moon is obvious. And here's a startling fact: A Full Moon shines 10 times brighter than a Quarter Moon, even though First Quarter and Last Quarter display half of the Moon's face illuminated.
In short, crimes, births, and strange occurrences happen all month long, but only those that occur around Full Moon cause people to talk about them.
Mars will look as big as the Full Moon
This astronomy myth crops up every time Mars and Earth reach their closest point in space.
Mars makes a great telescopic sight when it’s closest to Earth. However, it will never appear as large as the Full Moon to the naked eye.
Photo by NASA
But not all oppositions are equal. On August 27, 2003, the Red Planet appeared bigger and brighter than anyone alive will see again — well, unless you live to the year 2287.
After that? Astronomers' best guess is that Mars will reach its maximum size once again about 60,000 years in the future. But don't worry. It will be nearly as big and bright as it appeared in 2003 many times before then. In other words, the August 27, 2003, opposition was not unique.
Mars reaches opposition every 26 months. So, on November 7, 2005, and December 24, 2007, the astronomical community heard the same old song: "Mars will appear as big as the Full Moon to the naked eye." This statement is wrong. For Mars to look that large, it somehow would have to jump out of its orbit and move some 34 million miles (55 million kilometers) closer to the Sun.
Unlike most myths, I can explain exactly how this one began. Consider the original statement: "Through a telescope at 75x, Mars will appear as big as the Full Moon appears to the naked eye." In this sentence, "at 75x," means "at a magnification of 75." So, on August 27, 2003, if you looked at Mars through a telescope equipped with an eyepiece that provided a magnification of 75, Mars would have appeared as large (in other words, it would have had the same angular size) as the Full Moon does to your naked eye (that is, without any magnification).
Here's how the math works:
The Full Moon of August 2003 occurred August 12 in the Eastern time zone of the United States. Elsewhere in the country, the date was August 11. When full, the Moon had a diameter of 31.4 arcminutes (1 arcminute equals 1/60 of 1°). To compare this number to Mars' size, we have to change it into arcseconds: 1 arcsecond equals 1/60 of 1 arcminute, so the Full Moon's width is 31.4 arcminutes x 60, which equals 1,884 arcseconds. On August 27, 2003, Mars had a diameter of 25.11 arcseconds. To get the comparison, just divide Mars' size into the Full Moon's size: 1,884/25.11 = 75.
Aha! So the Full Moon would have appeared 75 times bigger than Mars in late August 2003. Therefore, if you magnified Mars 75 times — say, through a telescope — it would have appeared as large as the Full Moon does to the naked eye.
The next time Mars is closest to Earth will be January 27, 2010. At that time, the planet will lie 61.72 million miles (99.33 million km) from Earth. Compare that to August 27, 2003, when Mars was only 34.65 million miles (55.76 million km) from Earth.
OK, I can't resist: On January 27, 2010, if you look at Mars through a telescope that magnifies 132x, it will appear as large as the Full Moon does to the naked eye.
Martians carved "the Face"
New technology has revealed many great discoveries on the planets of our solar system. The subject of this myth, however, isn't one of them.
The Face on Mars is a butte, similar to many that lie around it. Aliens did not carve this feature.
Photo by NASA Mars Global Surveyor
In 1976, NASA's Viking 1 spacecraft was circling Mars, snapping photos of possible landing sites for its sister ship, Viking 2. One of its photos showed the shadowy likeness of a human face. An enormous head nearly 2 miles (3 km) across stared back at Viking 1 from a region of the planet called Cydonia.
Scientists cataloged it as a mesa, a common feature in that martian region. A few days later, NASA unveiled the image to the public. The caption noted a "huge rock formation ... which resembles a human head ... formed by shadows giving the illusion of eyes, nose and mouth."
Since then, the "Face on Mars" has become a cultural icon. It has appeared in books, magazines, radio talk shows, and films. Some people think the Face is evidence of life on Mars — evidence that NASA would rather keep hidden, say conspiracy theorists.
To use science to disprove the alien artifact theory, photographing Cydonia became a priority for NASA when the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) arrived there in September 1997. On April 5, 1998, when MGS flew over Cydonia for the first time, the Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) team snapped a picture 10 times sharper than the original Viking photos. When the image first appeared on a Jet Propulsion Laboratory web site, it revealed the Face to be a natural landform. End of story, right?
Not everyone was satisfied. The Face on Mars sits at 41° north martian latitude. And in April 1998 it was winter on Mars, a cloudy time of year. The MOC had to peer through wispy clouds to see the Face. Perhaps, said skeptics, haze hid traces of alien markings.
Seeing how the furor over the Face hadn't diminished, mission controllers prepared to target the area again. MGS was a mapping spacecraft that normally looked straight down and scanned the planet in 1.55-mile-wide (2.5 km) strips. It didn't pass over the Face often.
Nevertheless, on April 8, 2001 — a cloudless summer day in Cydonia — MGS had a second look. The MOC captured an extraordinary photo at the camera's maximum resolution. Each pixel in the 2001 image spans 5.1 feet (1.56 meters), compared to 141 feet (43m) per pixel in the best 1976 Viking 1 photo.
What the picture shows is the martian equivalent of a butte or mesa — landforms common around the American West. Cydonia contains many mesas like the Face, but the others don't look like human heads, so they've attracted little attention. The MGS science team studied them carefully, however, using a laser altimeter called MOLA onboard MGS.
MOLA could measure the heights of surface features with a vertical precision of 8 to 12 inches (20 to 30 centimeters). The instrument took hundreds of altitude measurements of the mesa-like features around Cydonia including the Face. The height of the Face, its volume, and its aspect ratio — all of its dimensions, in fact — are similar to the other mesas. It's not exotic in any way.
The mesas of Cydonia are of great interest to planetary geologists because they lie in a transition zone between cratered highlands to the south and smoother lowland plains to the north. Some scientists think the northern plains are all that's left of an ancient martian ocean. If so, Cydonia might have sat near the edge of a large body of water. And that's a lot more intriguing to scientists than a mesa that resembles a face.
Seasons occur because of Earth's changing distance from the Sun
This myth sounds right, but science says otherwise.
These four images of Earth show how our planet’s tilt affects its appearance at the start of each season.
Photo by NASA/JPL/Johns Hopkins University
At the same time, however, the South Pole tilts away from the Sun. That means winter is beginning for inhabitants of the Southern Hemisphere.
And, regarding distances, Earth is approximately 3 million miles (5 million km) closer to the Sun in early January than it is in early July. That works out to a bit more than a 3 percent swing from Earth's nearest approach to the Sun to its farthest. Although small, 3 percent is not insignificant. The different distances mean the Southern Hemisphere receives more solar energy during its summer than the Northern Hemisphere does in its summer.
Summer and winter occur on dates called the solstices, which mark the highest and lowest points the Sun reaches in our sky. In the Northern Hemisphere, the Sun stands 47° (our planet's 23.5° tilt times two) higher in the sky June 21 than it does December 21. So, around June 21 of each year, summer begins north of the equator, and winter begins south of that line. For this reason, it's incorrect to call June 21 the "summer" solstice. Summer begins on that date only in the Northern Hemisphere. Here at the magazine, we use the terms June solstice and December solstice to signify these dates.
The Moon has a dark side
Perhaps it isn't amazing that an album that's sold 45 million copies spawned an astronomy myth.
Half the Moon — the side facing away from the Sun — always lies in darkness. Because the Moon spins, however, that half changes constantly.
Photo by David Jenkins
What is true is that, at any given moment, half of the Moon is in darkness. But the dark side is always the side that faces away from the Sun. That's also the case with Earth. Half our planet experiences day while night occurs on the other half. Because the Earth and Moon rotate (spin), some areas are moving into sunlight as different areas move into darkness. Earth rotates once a day, while the Moon takes 27.3 days to spin once.
So, remember, half the of Moon is always dark, but that half is constantly changing.
The world will end December 21, 2012
This myth does nothing but scare children and promote a movie.
The Mayans were terrific architects, and they watched the planets carefully. They did not, however, predict the end of the world. Wikipedia image
Photo by Wikipedia
After these books appeared, Nancy Lieder, a self-declared psychic, wrote on her web site ZetaTalk that the inhabitants of a fictional planet orbiting the nearby star Zeta Reticuli warned her that Earth was in danger from Nibiru. The prediction said the collision of Nibiru and Earth would occur in May 2003.
When nothing happened in that month, claimants moved the doomsday date forward to December 2012. Only recently have people linked these two fables to the end of the Mayan long-count at the winter solstice in 2012 — hence the predicted doomsday date of December 21, 2012.
Nibiru is a name in Babylonian astrology sometimes associated with the god Marduk. Scholars of ancient Mesopotamia refute Sitchin's claims that Nibiru is a planet and that the Sumerians knew about it. Sumer was a great civilization, but they left few astronomical records. They had no understanding that the planets orbited the Sun. That idea first developed in ancient Greece two millennia after the end of Sumer.
Some people claim NASA found Nibiru in 1983 using the Infrared Astronomy Satellite (IRAS), which carried out a 10-month sky survey. IRAS cataloged 350,000 infrared sources, and initially many of these sources were unidentified. Astronomers have followed up all of these observations with more powerful instruments both on the ground and in space. The rumor about a 10th planet erupted in 1984 after a scientific paper appeared in Astrophysical Journal Letters titled "Unidentified point sources in the IRAS minisurvey." In 1987, scientists published the identification of these mystery objects as distant galaxies. No IRAS source has ever turned out to be a planet. To an astronomer, persistent claims about a planet that is nearby but invisible are just plain silly.
Claims of a "Planet X" being Eris also are absurd. Eris is one of several dwarf planets recently found by astronomers in the outer solar system. All these objects are on normal orbits far from Earth. Eris is smaller than our Moon, and its orbit never brings it closer than about 4 billion miles (6.5 billion km).
Believers in the Nibiru collision myth tout photos and videos on the Internet that appear to show the planet. The great majority of the photos and videos show some feature near the Sun. Some proponents believe Nibiru has been hiding behind the Sun for the past several years. The photos are secondary images of the Sun caused by internal reflections in the lens. Photographers know this effect as lens flare. Such images appear opposite the Sun, as if reflected across the image's center. Lens flare is especially obvious in videos because as the camera moves, the false image dances about always exactly opposite the real image.
Lacking facts, some collision supporters claim our government is keeping the details secret. Uh huh. If Nibiru were real, thousands of astronomers around the globe would be tracking it right now.
With all we know about this myth, why is there so much excitement then? Who is promoting such claims? The simple answer seems to be Columbia Pictures. As I write this, publicity for Columbia's new film 2012, to be released in November 2009, is everywhere. The film's trailer shows a tidal wave breaking over the Himalayas, with the following words: "How would the governments of our planet prepare 6 billion people for the end of the world? [long pause] They wouldn't. [long pause] Find out the Truth. Google search 2012."
For the film, Columbia created a fake scientific web site (www.instituteforhumancontinuity.org). This site belongs to a fictitious organization called the Institute for Human Continuity (IHC). According to the web site, the IHC's mission is the survival of mankind.
The site further says that in 2004, IHC scientists confirmed with 94 percent certainty that the world would be destroyed in 2012. OK, I'm a sci-fi movie buff. But let's settle for buying a ticket. Don't buy the hype that the world will end in 2012.
There's no gravity in space
If this myth were true, the universe would be a far different place.
During the Gemini 4 mission, astronaut Ed White conducted a spacewalk June 3, 1965. Although he appears weightless, gravity from Earth, the Moon, the Sun, and elsewhere acts upon him when he’s in space.
Photo by NASA
Gravity is a force created by any body that has mass. We usually think of the Sun, Moon, and planets (especially Earth) as objects that have gravity, but you and I, because we have some mass, also exert a gravitational force — albeit a really tiny one!
Without getting into some heavy-duty equations here, British mathematician Isaac Newton (1643-1727) proved that gravitational force decreases as the distance from any object increases. But it never vanishes. In fact, Earth's gravity 62.5 miles (100 km) above its surface is still 97 percent as strong as its gravitational pull at sea level.
So, for example, the Sun's gravitational attraction of Mercury (the closest planet) is stronger than its gravitational attraction for Venus, Earth, or any other planet. (That's why Mercury has to move faster than the other planets. If it orbited at the same speed as Earth, the Sun quickly would swallow it.) Likewise, Earth's gravity keeps the Moon circling around us once every 27.3 days, and Jupiter's gravity keeps more than 60 moons orbiting around it.
So, if there's gravity in space, why does it look like the astronauts are floating? The reason is that objects in space are in a continuous state of freefall. This term describes a state of motion with no acceleration other than that provided by gravity. A similar thing could happen on Earth to an elevator passenger and her purse, both of which would be equally "weightless" if the elevator fell rapidly enough.
And consider one last fact. If there were no gravity in space, weather and communication satellites would not orbit Earth, Earth would not orbit the Sun, and the Sun would not orbit the center of the Milky Way. Indeed, everything would shoot off in a straight line, and chaos would rule. But there is gravity in space, and lots of it.
You can see the Great Wall of China from the Moon
This would be a myth even if an astronaut used a telescope.
The Great Wall of China is invisible from space. It’s just too narrow for astronauts to see.
Photo by Holley Y. Bakich
When thinking about how feasible making this observation is, most people account for the Great Wall's length — a whopping 5,500 miles (8,850 km) — but not its width, which at maximum spans a mere 30 feet (9.1 meters). From the average distance of the Moon, some 238,000 miles (383,000 km) from Earth, a feature on our planet would have to be roughly 70 miles (113 km) across for the unaided human eye to discern it.
OK, then how about the follow-up question: Can an astronaut see the Great Wall of China from Earth orbit? Again, the answer is no. Although some scientists have argued that this observation is theoretically possible under the best conditions of atmospheric clarity and Sun angle, it requires a resolving power (visual acuity) more than 5 times that of the human eye.
