The Zodiacal Light

The zodiacal light is caused by sunlight reflecting from meteoric dust that orbits the sun in the plane of the solar system, remnants of the vast nebula of dust and gas out of which the solar system was born more than four billion years ago. Like the planets, this diffuse stream of particles reflects light, although faintly and rarely seen. Moonless nights of winter are the best time to see the zodiacal light. and nowhere better than here, on the Tropic of Cancer, where the plane of the solar...

 Wonder of the Natural World

Sun's nature as revealed by modern science far more wonderful: no mere angels or gold coin, but an enormous sphere into which a million Earths could be packed, in the core of which the hidden nuclei of atoms are being jammed together, hydrogen transfigured into helium, the energy latent in hydrogen for billions of years released, the Earth and other planets warmed and lit thereby, and the same process repeated four hundred billion times elsewhere in the Milky Way galaxy? The blueprints, deta...