Skywatch for the week of April 7, 2025
By Jon U. Bell
April 7, 2025 at 12:00 AM EDT
Mon Apr 7, 2025 FALLING INTO THE NEAREST BLACK HOLE
What happens if you fall into a black hole? Well, it would be bad: if you jumped in, your feet would be pulled with a lot more force than your head. You would be stretched out as thin as a piece of spaghetti, which of course is not a natural state for the human body to be in, and you would disintegrate, your atoms eventually spiraling into the black hole. Are you likely to fall into a black hole? The nearest known black hole we know of in this evening’s sky is just to the east of Orion the Hunter, in a constellation known as Monoceros the Unicorn. It is here where we find V616 Monocerotis. This black hole is about 3,000 light years away, or 18,000 trillion miles. So even the nearest black hole is so far away that nobody is in any danger of falling in!
Skywatch Tuesday 4-8-2025.mp3
Tue Apr 8, 2025 LIGHT SPEED ZOOM OUT
Traveling at the speed of light is impossible. Too bad. The moon is only a quarter of a million miles away. At the speed of light, you could get there in less than a second and a half. The light from the sun takes eight minutes to travel 93 million miles to Earth. Pluto is four and a half light hours away. The comets at the edge of our solar system, perhaps a trillion miles out, are nearly ten weeks away at speed-of-light travel. Then we come to the star Alpha Centauri, a little over four light years distant – that’s 25 trillion miles. The farthest stars in our Milky Way are over a hundred thousand light years away – that’s about 600 thousand trillion miles - and the nearest big galaxy, Andromeda, is fifteen million trillion miles out – 2 and a half million light years. But distant quasars are over 12 billion light years away – 90 billion trillion miles – far out!
Skywatch Wednesday 4-9-2025.mp3
Wed Apr 9, 2025 STARING AT THE SUN
The sun is too bright to look at, even with sunglasses. Thousands of years ago sunwatchers observed and described large sunspots, at least 40,000 miles across, that sometimes appeared on its face. They did this by looking at the sun only during sunrise or sunset when it was dim and red. And on a misty day in the year 1612 in Bavaria, the Jesuit astronomer Father Scheiner first observed sunspots directly through a telescope. As you may have guessed, these methods are definitely NOT safe: even though the amount of visible light is cut down by the thick column of air at the horizon, the sun can still blind you. So never stare at the sun, even when it’s cloudy, not even at sunrise or sunset.
Skywatch Thursday 4-10-2025.mp3
Thu Apr 10, 2025 NAME THAT PLANET 2
Let’s play “name that planet.” I’ll name some of their features, and you try to identify it. The first planet has craters named for Cleopatra, Amelia Earhart, and Sacajawea, plus two continents - Ishtar and Aphrodite. The planet is Venus, and its features are named after love goddesses or famous women. Now try, Tombaugh, Norgay Mountains, Tartarus, Balrog and Cthulhu. That would be Pluto. How about the plains of Utopia and Chryse, or the Hellas basin, the Tharsis bulge, the Mariner Valley or Mount Olympus? That’s Mars. Where do you find the Caloris basin, or craters named Bach, Velazquez, Cervantes, Chopin, Tolkien, Shakespeare or Mozart? Artists, musicians and writers’ names can be found on Mercury.
Skywatch Friday 4-11-2025.mp3
Fri Apr 11, 2025 APRIL FULL MOON
The moon is full this weekend. Since spring is underway, the Sioux Indians call April’s full moon, the Moon of Greening Grass; to the Winnebago, it is Planting Corn Moon. The Seneca Indians, the Keepers of the Western Door, recognize this as the time of the strawberry dance, while the Keepers of the Eastern Door, the Mohawk, know it as “Onerahtokha,” the budding time, which is similar to the Kiowa’s Leaf Moon, as this is the time of year when new leaves form on trees. The Cheyenne Indians speak of it as the Moon When the Geese Lay Eggs. To the Mandan Indians of North Dakota, it is simply the Planter’s Moon; it was under the light of this full moon many people planted tobacco, potato, and the Three Sisters - the seeds of corn, squash and bean.
What happens if you fall into a black hole? Well, it would be bad: if you jumped in, your feet would be pulled with a lot more force than your head. You would be stretched out as thin as a piece of spaghetti, which of course is not a natural state for the human body to be in, and you would disintegrate, your atoms eventually spiraling into the black hole. Are you likely to fall into a black hole? The nearest known black hole we know of in this evening’s sky is just to the east of Orion the Hunter, in a constellation known as Monoceros the Unicorn. It is here where we find V616 Monocerotis. This black hole is about 3,000 light years away, or 18,000 trillion miles. So even the nearest black hole is so far away that nobody is in any danger of falling in!
Skywatch Tuesday 4-8-2025.mp3
Tue Apr 8, 2025 LIGHT SPEED ZOOM OUT
Traveling at the speed of light is impossible. Too bad. The moon is only a quarter of a million miles away. At the speed of light, you could get there in less than a second and a half. The light from the sun takes eight minutes to travel 93 million miles to Earth. Pluto is four and a half light hours away. The comets at the edge of our solar system, perhaps a trillion miles out, are nearly ten weeks away at speed-of-light travel. Then we come to the star Alpha Centauri, a little over four light years distant – that’s 25 trillion miles. The farthest stars in our Milky Way are over a hundred thousand light years away – that’s about 600 thousand trillion miles - and the nearest big galaxy, Andromeda, is fifteen million trillion miles out – 2 and a half million light years. But distant quasars are over 12 billion light years away – 90 billion trillion miles – far out!
Skywatch Wednesday 4-9-2025.mp3
Wed Apr 9, 2025 STARING AT THE SUN
The sun is too bright to look at, even with sunglasses. Thousands of years ago sunwatchers observed and described large sunspots, at least 40,000 miles across, that sometimes appeared on its face. They did this by looking at the sun only during sunrise or sunset when it was dim and red. And on a misty day in the year 1612 in Bavaria, the Jesuit astronomer Father Scheiner first observed sunspots directly through a telescope. As you may have guessed, these methods are definitely NOT safe: even though the amount of visible light is cut down by the thick column of air at the horizon, the sun can still blind you. So never stare at the sun, even when it’s cloudy, not even at sunrise or sunset.
Skywatch Thursday 4-10-2025.mp3
Thu Apr 10, 2025 NAME THAT PLANET 2
Let’s play “name that planet.” I’ll name some of their features, and you try to identify it. The first planet has craters named for Cleopatra, Amelia Earhart, and Sacajawea, plus two continents - Ishtar and Aphrodite. The planet is Venus, and its features are named after love goddesses or famous women. Now try, Tombaugh, Norgay Mountains, Tartarus, Balrog and Cthulhu. That would be Pluto. How about the plains of Utopia and Chryse, or the Hellas basin, the Tharsis bulge, the Mariner Valley or Mount Olympus? That’s Mars. Where do you find the Caloris basin, or craters named Bach, Velazquez, Cervantes, Chopin, Tolkien, Shakespeare or Mozart? Artists, musicians and writers’ names can be found on Mercury.
Skywatch Friday 4-11-2025.mp3
Fri Apr 11, 2025 APRIL FULL MOON
The moon is full this weekend. Since spring is underway, the Sioux Indians call April’s full moon, the Moon of Greening Grass; to the Winnebago, it is Planting Corn Moon. The Seneca Indians, the Keepers of the Western Door, recognize this as the time of the strawberry dance, while the Keepers of the Eastern Door, the Mohawk, know it as “Onerahtokha,” the budding time, which is similar to the Kiowa’s Leaf Moon, as this is the time of year when new leaves form on trees. The Cheyenne Indians speak of it as the Moon When the Geese Lay Eggs. To the Mandan Indians of North Dakota, it is simply the Planter’s Moon; it was under the light of this full moon many people planted tobacco, potato, and the Three Sisters - the seeds of corn, squash and bean.