5 Unusual Facts About Stars

Orion constellation

1. Most of the stars you view from the earth at night are actually binary stars. That is, two stars circle each other creating an imagined point of gravitation, or a smaller star circles around the “main star”. Sometimes these main stars draw material from the smaller one, as they come closer to each other. There is a mass limit that a planet can hold without fusing nuclear reaction. If Jupiter was larger it might have fused as a brown dwarf, a kind of semi-star, many moons ago. It is actually more common in other solar systems, evidenced by their relative lack of planets. This is because most of the material which is locked in the gravitational field of the main star gathers up in one place, which in the end lights up as a star and forms a binary system. There can also be more than two stars in one system, yet binary systems are more common.

What Your Armpit Hair Says About You

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    The sight of hair can trigger an emotional response depending on cultural expectations. One Swedish woman faced global criticism for exposing her grown armpit hair, although her compatriots stood by her in solidarity. Gender and culture combine to shape attitudes towards hair. It is taboo for women to grow armpit hair in some […]

Did T. Rex Have Feathers Too?

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  It’s an exciting time to be a paleontologist. More and more new discoveries are changing the way we perceive the prehistoric behemoths that dominated the earth for over 100 million years. That some dinosaurs were feathered is now beyond dispute, but this specialization has been thought to apply only to very small dinosaurs, or […]

2012 Indian Ocean Earthquake May Be Dry Run for Devastating Tsunami

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On April 11, 2012, a massive earthquake with a magnitude of 8.6 on the Richter scale struck off the coast of Indonesia. Unlike what happened with the 2004 Great Sumatra Earthquake and Indian Ocean Tsunami – which struck fairly close to the recent earthquake’s epicenter – only a minor tsunami was generated. Throughout the Indian […]

Ever Wanted to Magnify the Universe?

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Ever wondered how a planetary moon compares in size to a continent on Earth? Or how much bigger a sesame seed is than a skin cell? The interactive infographic you can see by following the links “accurately illustrates the scale of over 100 items within the observable universe ranging from galaxies to insects, nebulae and […]