follow some astronomy blogs and podcasts

and rightly so: HUGE NEWS: first possibly Earthlike extrasolar planet found!

The cause of gamma-ray bursts — the most violent explosions in the Universe — were thought to come from hot gas jets blasted out from black holes. Pawan Kumar (Uni Texas) has shown that the gamma rays are generated billions of kilometres away from the black hole. Instead Kumar suggests magnetic energy powers the bursts similar to the process which produces solar flares but more energetic.

Source: The Sky at Night magazine (BBC publications)

Edit: I suppose billions of km is nothing in this context.

why we only ever see the same face of the Moon or something like that.

The force exerted by the Moon on the Earth is having a similar effect on the Earth’s rotation. Gradually the Earth is slowing down. One day, the length of time the Earth takes to spin round its axis will be the same as the Moon takes to orbit us. When that happens, we will only be able to see the Moon from one side of the Earth.

From The sky at night page on the moon

Nice pics of models showing relative sizes of astronomical objects at geek counterpoint via Phil Plait again.

Phil Plait’s blog pointed me to Carl Sagan’s Reflections on a mote of dust

Via Astronomy Cast podcast – Mount Everest (or Sagarmatha or Chomolungma) is the highest mountain in the world and about the highest a mountain could be owing to the Earth’s self-gravity.

Hence the Caledonian mountains of the Devonian period (400MYA) could never have been higher than the Himalayas (they are believed to have been at least as high as the Alps and possibly as high as the Himalayas).

Via Bad Astronomy Q & A podcast – the milky way is thought to be an example of a barred spiral galaxy

In 2005, observations by the Spitzer Space Telescope backed up previously collected evidence that suggested the Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy. Observations by radio telescopes had for years suggested our galaxy to be barred, but Spitzer’s vision in the infrared region of the spectrum has provided a more definite calculation. (Wikipedia on barred spiral galaxies)

(NGC 1300 pictured. HST)

A colleague at work is interested in astronomy and has gotten me interested in seeing what I can learn about astronomy by these means.