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As of this week, I will be blogging regularly for Forbes on planetary science, climate change, physics, and math. My first two posts are up; go check them out and please follow my blog!

Why are Pluto’s moons so weird?

Pluto is a strange little world, but its moons are even weirder.

Whether or not you want to call it a “planet”, it’s a body strongly influenced by two other worlds: the giant planet Neptune and its moon Charon. Pluto crosses Neptune’s orbit twice during its long sojourn around the Sun. But Charon (which I pronounce KAR-on, but you’ll also hear SHAR-on and other variations) is the big deal: the moon is more than 10 percent of the mass of Pluto. It exerts such a strong gravitational pull that both objects orbit a spot in empty space between them, and forces Pluto to present one face to Charon, just like Earth forces the Moon to keep the same side faces us. If you lived on the “far side” of Pluto, you’d never see Charon in the sky.

Pluto and Charon together have four much smaller moons: Styx, Nix, Kerberos, and Hydra. We don’t know much about those moons yet: Nix and Hydra were only discovered in 2005, Kerberos was found in 2011, and Styx in 2012. Even in our most powerful telescopes, they appear as dots. (Pluto and Charon aren’t much better off — they look like blurry disks even to the Hubble Space Telescope.) But looking at their orbits around Pluto and Charon, astronomers found something weird.

Those tiny moons dance in tandem. [Read the rest at Forbes…]

New analysis shows Earth is warming faster than we thought

Politicians may dither and talking heads bloviate, but the scientific consensus is clear: climate change is real, humans are responsible, and its effects are already being felt around the world. At the same time, some details are in question, including how fast climate change is increasing and which specific effects we see are due to it as opposed to other sources.

That’s the context for a new paper in Science today from researchers at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA, which is somewhat ironically pronounced “Noah”). Thomas Karl and colleagues took a second look at global surface temperatures — the ordinary temperatures we’re used to seeing on weather news or in our phone apps — and found the official numbers on rising temperatures are too low. To put it another way: the consensus opinion is that we are currently in a global warming “hiatus”, but Karl and coauthors report instead that temperatures are climbing as fast as ever.

As if we didn’t have enough to worry about. [Read the rest at Forbes…]