2019-05-31 (Friday)
Today, I learned that:
I owe a big apology to all my faithful readers for having been absent with new posts for almost two months, so let me make it up today with a quite few interesting facts:
1. Image of a black hole
During the month of April, we received the astonishing news that astronomers had finally managed to catch a black hole on film. The image was captured by the Event Horizon telescope (EHT), a network of eight radio telescopes spanning locations from Antarctica to Spain and Chile, in an effort involving more than 200 scientists. Read more about it in ref. #1 below.
2. Late Easter (continuation from earlier post)
In my post of 2019-03-05 I wrote about the late date of Easter this year, and as you may remember my friend, the German-Swedish meteorologist André Franke explained it all for us.
However, I have received comments about this subject. In 2019, the March equinox occurred on March 20, and there was a full moon already the next day, March 21. So, why was not Easter Sunday celebrated on March 24? André can explain that, as well. It is quite complicated, but here is the short explanation:
It all started in year 325, when the First Church Council of Nicaea among other things decided that the March equinox should always fall on March 21, and then Easter Sunday would always be the first Sunday following the first full month after the March equinox. But as we know, the Earth’s rotation around the Sun is not exactly 365 days. It is approximately 6 h more, and that causes that the fixed March equinox day is not always the same actual, astronomical day for the same equinox, as happened this year.
If you want know the long story, take a look at reference #2. Unfortunately, it is written in Swedish, but there are many other sources around the internet that can tell the same story.
3. Baarle
Baarle is a village right on the border between the Netherlands and Belgium. 91 % of the total area of the village belongs to the Dutch, the rest is Belgian. But it is not a clean cut, there are in fact 16 Belgian exclaves within the Dutch territory, and they in turn surround seven Dutch areas. See also reference #3 below. Thanks to Radio Sweden’s Andreas Liljeheden for yet another idea to an interesting blog fact, see also ref. 4 below! (You may remember Andreas’s earlier contribution to my blog on 2018-10-20, when he presented the donkey steps in the EU headquarters in Brussels.)
4. Different maps of the world
One of my interests is maps, traditional, historic, different kinds of maps – you name them! It is therefore a great pleasure for me to present a total of 45 different maps of the world, the big majority of them are without doubt something you have never seen before. Click on the link of ref. #5 below and start being amazed. (I like maps #1, 2, 7, 8, …)
That’s what I learned in school !
Refs.:
1: Black hole picture captured for first time in space breakthrough
2: Vårdagjämning, fullmåne och ovanligt sen påsk: därför ser almanackan underlig ut 2019
3: Baarle
What did you learn in School today? 