ceres: a small planet in a giant solar system
Planets and Bright Stars
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Solar System
The Solar System is the gravitationally bound system of the Sun and the masses that orbit it, most prominently its eight planets, of which Earth is one. The system formed about 4.6 billion years ago when a dense region of a molecular cloud collapsed, creating the Sun and a protoplanetary disc from which the orbiting bodies assembled.
The Cosmic Crash That Made the Moon
About 4.5 billion years ago, give or take, a planet the size of Mars slammed into the Earth. The Moon is what was left of the wreckage.
Eyes on the Solar System - NASA/JPL
Explore the 3D world of the Solar System. Learn about past and future missions.
We need more tiny knowledge projects—here’s one
Crowdsourcing dynamic illustrations for a new astronomy book by Terry Tao and Tanya Klowden. The other day I was reading the sample chapter of a new book by Terence Tao and Tanya Klowden, on the so-called cosmic distance ladder. It’s a lovely piece of writing. The chapter tells the story of how Johannes Kepler, using data collected by Tycho Brahe, solved the puzzle of planetary motion. It puts us in the discoverers’ shoes: instead of working backwards from Kepler’s equations, we work forwards from the inexp
The Daily Planet #125 - The Daily Planet
Space to Grow — the privatisation of the solar system
A useful primer explains how cosmic exploration has been commercialised and explores the challenges in policing this new wild west
Install Ceph Server on Proxmox VE
The video tutorial explains the installation of a distributed Ceph storage on an existing three node Proxmox VE cluster. At the end of this tutorial you will be able to build a free and open source hyper-converged virtualization and storage cluster.
The Daily Planet #126: A Plausible Dystopia - The Daily Planet
Intelligence as a planetary scale process
Conventionally, intelligence is seen as a property of individuals. However, it is also known to be a property of collectives. Here, we broaden the idea of intelligence as a collective property and extend it to the planetary scale. We consider the ways in which the appearance of technological intelligence may represent a kind of planetary scale transition, and thus might be seen not as something which happens on a planet but to a planet, much as some models propose the origin of life itself was a planetary phenomenon. Our approach follows the recognition among researchers that the correct scale to understand key aspects of life and its evolution is planetary, as opposed to the more traditional focus on individual species. We explore ways in which the concept may prove useful for three distinct domains: Earth Systems and Exoplanet studies; Anthropocene and Sustainability studies; and the study of Technosignatures and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). We argue that explorations of planetary intelligence, defined as the acquisition and application of collective knowledge operating at a planetary scale and integrated into the function of coupled planetary systems, can prove a useful framework for understanding possible paths of the long-term evolution of inhabited planets including future trajectories for life on Earth and predicting features of intelligentially steered planetary evolution on other worlds.
PlanetScale - the world’s fastest and most scalable cloud hosting for Vitess, Neki, and Postgres
PlanetScale offers the world’s fastest and most scalable cloud hosting for Vitess, Neki, and Postgres.
The Coming Second Copernican Revolution | NOEMA
Astrobiology is rewiring our understanding of the intimate connection between life and planets as they appear in the universe.
changelog.earth | Planetary release notes
New species. Balance changes. Unresolved bugs. An unofficial changelog for Earth.
Planetary Sapience & Planetary Stupidity: a Bildungsroman for the Baby Noosphere | Antikythera
That is, the faculty of recollection and foresight? Until recently, I would argue, our planet was amnesiac. That is, no part of it was reflectively aware of the place of the present relative to the established past nor the expected future. But then peculiar animals emerged, capable—no matter how imperfectly—of cooperation, abstraction and invention. In the last blink of geologic time, through the collaboration of these animals with their increasingly cunning artifacts, this state of planetary amnesia has faltering begun being cured. That is, through our artifacts, our planet is becoming aware of its own unfolding biography. In our fallible attempts to model our world—alongside our growing legion of sensors—The Earth system has developed a way of recollecting its deepest past and tracking the changing complexities of its present so as to forecast its furthest future.
