tags: astrophysics

2016

February

2016 Feb 12

Gravity

Social media was abuzz with the news that gravitational waves have been detected.

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2016 Feb 16

Planet X and General Relativity

Newtonian mechanics predicted that there should be a planet inside the orbit of Mercury which they named Vulcan to explain Mercury's anomalous precession of its perihelion, but it turns out that what was really going on was due to the curvature of spacetime predicted by General Relativity.

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2016 Feb 19

Nicolaus Copernicus

The irony is that Copernicus set forth his model of heliocentrism without any empirical evidence whatsoever, and his model was less accurate than Ptolemy's geocentric model in making predictions of planetary positions and he got the shape of orbits wrong (he thought they were circular and they're actually very slightly elliptical).

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