Space & the Cosmos
Things you can never take apart, running on physics you can only watch.
- How a Rocket Engine Works — Burning the fuel is the easy part. The hard part is shoving three hundred kilos of propellant a second into a chamber already at ninety-seven atmospheres — which is why most of this engine is a pump, driven by a second, smaller rocket engine bolted to its side.
- How the Solar System Works — Eight planets falling around a star, and never landing. Every orbit is an ellipse with the Sun off to one side — and the Sun is not standing still either: it circles a point just outside its own surface while the whole system flies through the galaxy at 230 km a second.
- What Is a Black Hole? — The dark circle is not the hole — it is 2.6 times wider than the hole, because the hole bends the paths of the light behind it. Everything you can see of a black hole is the last thing that got away.