Category Kids Queries

Although movies portray asteroid belts as spaceship-smashing jumbles of rock, our solar system’s real asteroid belt isn’t nearly so treacherous. The average distance between rocks is nearly a million miles (1.6 million km), which would give spaceship pilots plenty of wiggle room.

It’s estimated that our asteroid belt once contained about 1000 times the mass it currently contains. However, within about one million years of its formation, it was down to somewhere in the vicinity of the stabilized amount we see today. Once this system was stabilized with almost no collisions, the asteroids simply travel in their respective orbits with the field itself neither increasing nor decreasing in mass significantly since that initial stabilization period.

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Nobody knows, but don’t lose any sleep over the thought of a space rock landing in your living room. Several monitoring projects – such as Spacewatch and the Minor Planet Center – use powerful telescopes to scan the skies and track the courses of any “near-Earth objects,” including asteroids that might drift too close to home. NASA has identified 90 percent of all the near-Earth objects large enough to cause catastrophic damage if they stuck our planet. So far, we’re in the clear.

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Because they’ve smashed into every planet in the solar system, including Earth, and one good hit could mean game over for life here. Asteroids travel at tens of thousands of miles an hour – speeds that transfer into destructive energy when they collide with a planet, moon, or each other. An asteroid 450 feet (137 m) across could destroy an entire city. More than a thousand people were injured in 2013 when an asteroid just 62 feet (19 m) wide exploded high in the atmosphere above Chelyabinsk, Russia. An asteroid impact 65 million years ago may have wiped out the dinosaurs.

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Stephen Hawking is famous for shedding light on black holes in 1960s through today in England. Considered the most brilliant scientific mind since Einstein, Stephen Hawking is famous for trying to reverse engineer the workings of the universe through quantum physics – or the study of the universe at its teeniest-weeniest level. He’s also an expert on black holes and their bizarre behavior. Based on his observations, Hawking believes that just as the universe began in a cosmic big bang; it will someday end up collapsing into black holes.

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Because space is big. The galaxy might be teeming with life, but the gulfs between stars make visiting our neighbors an impossible mission – at least for now. Remember, it would take thousands of years to travel to the closest star outside our solar system using modern spaceship technology.

As previously mentioned, space is big, so there are tons of regions to listen for alien signals. If we’re not listening precisely in the direction from which a signal is originating, we’d never hear it.

Radio technology may be commonplace here on Earth, but on far-flung worlds, alien societies may have graduated to more advanced communication technologies, like neutrino signals. We can’t decipher those just yet.

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Sports historians debate over the origin of football’s name. One explanation is that, in the mid-1800s, American football evolved from the game of rugby, a rough-and-tumble sport that, in turn, evolved from a much bloodier medieval game called campball. In both rugby and campball, players use their feet as well as their hands to move the ball around, although tossing the ball forward is a no-no. Rules changed all the time in the early days of American football. Even forward tosses were illegal until 1906, when they were introduced to make the sport safer. Players’ use of feet in the game’s early days likely played a role in its name.

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