Adventures in Learning – You Are Here #2

More fun facts from my latest non-fiction find, You Are Here by Christopher Potter:

You know how on some nights you can see the crescent moon, but also a faded impression of the rest of the moon alongside it? I’ve always thought (without really thinking about it too much) that this had something to do with the regular sunshine getting to the moon. Actually, the reason we can see the rest of the moon, albeit dimly, is because it’s illuminated by reflected earthshine. The most important thing I learned from this is that I should stop accepting half-assed scientific theories of my own ridiculously uninformed creation, and actually look things up on a regular basis.

One of the brightest stars out there is a red supergiant named Betelgeuse (and, like Michael Keaton’s gross-out afterlife criminal, pronounced Beetlejuice). The word comes from a long ago translated version of an Arab word, with possible original meanings varying from “hand of the central one” to “armpit of the central one.”

Quasars. Always heard the word, always vaguely assumed they were something that didn’t necessarily exist (or possibly even belonged completely to the sci-fictional realm). Turns out they’re the light caused by a black hole eating up all the matter around it, until there isn’t any more in its gravitational reach. So in this active quasar stage, black holes are anything but black, and even scarier than regular black holes – after all, there seems to be one at the centre of every galaxy, including our Milky Way, but it can’t get us… in case you were worrying about that. I was.