Or, another fine whine…

Even though this is sweeps month for TV and all the networks are trotting out their “finest” (read: most dramatic, salacious, violent, etc.) programming, chances are if you’re a child (or an adult who acts like a child), you’ve heard (or said) that wonderful whine many times.

Well, what are you waiting for? Get the whiners outside and do some stargazing! Just step outside and look up. If you’re not looking at cloud bottoms, you’re looking at stars (probably through some light pollution). So, what’s overhead these mid-November nights? Well, the Moon presents a nice observing target. Get that pair of birding binoculars out of the closet and use them to check out the craters and mountains. I don’t know when you’ll be looking, but if you want a hint as to how it will look tonight (or any night you go out), check out this page.

I like to look at the Moon. The craters are fascinating, especially when you think about how many of them date back about 3.8 billion years — to a time when the solar system was a little over a billion years old. That seems old to us — although in the span of the universe’s age (about 13 billion years), the solar system is but a baby.

The universe does stuff like that you. You’re standing there looking at the stars or a planet or something and next thing you know you’re thinking about the age of the cosmos and how old the planets are and then you remember that people have only been around a small, small fraction of time.

Amazing!

In all the years I’ve been talking about astronomy, I’ve always told people there was no such thing as a dumb question. And I meant it. That hasn’t stopped people from trying to come up with ’em though. Today’s deep question comes to us courtesy of my niece Oriana, who said she heard this one on TV: “How many corn dogs does it take to fill up a black hole?”

Well, Oriana, I bet you thought I wouldn’t try to answer that because it was too dumb. Truth to tell is you probably can’t come up with an exact number of how many corn dogs it would take to fill up a black hole, because, well… because the obvious answer is that you can’t fill up a black hole. The buggers just keep swallowing things up, getting bigger and bigger all the time. They’re weird animals that way. You can chuck all the corn dogs in that black hole that you want, and it’ll just keep sucking them down. Yeah, it’s a trick question, but what do you want from an advertising copywriter who probably thought it was a cute “astronomy” thing to ask in an ad about trucks?

You wanna know more about black holes? I have a scintillating discussion on my web page that invokes Star Trek, Sherlock Holmes, and the Hubble Space Telescope. Go over here and read it and then come back here and leave me a comment if you think there’s another way to answer the corn dogs-in-a-black-hole question!