Bill Wall's Personal Blog

    Venus spins on its axis clockwise, making it the only planet in the Solar System that spins in retrograde, or opposite spin of Earth and all the other planets.   There are more volcanoes on Venus than any other planet.   Astronomers have discovered over 1,600 volcanoes on Venus so far.   Scientists think that most of these volcanoes are dormant. A day on Venus lasts 343 Earth days, while a year on Venus is shorter, at just 224.7 Earth days.   Venus takes longer to rotate about its axis than any other planet.   The days of Venus are longer than the years.   The temperature on Venus can reach 870 degrees Fahrenheit due to an extreme greenhouse effect and the atmosphere being made up of 96.5% carbon dioxide and sulfuric acid.   Venus has the hottest surface of any planet, about 867 degrees Fahrenheit.   The air pressure on Venus is 90 times higher that the pressure at sea level on Earth, That’s equivalent to about half a mile un...

  Mercury is the smallest (3,032 miles in diameter) and most innermost planet.   It is the least understood of all planets.   It has the largest eccentricity of any planet.   Two moons of Saturn are larger than Mercury.   Its temperature on the surface can be as cold as 290 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, or as hot as 800 degrees Fahrenheit (Venus is hotter at 863 degrees Fahrenheit).   The names for the features of Mercury are odd.   Craters are named for dead artists, musicians, painters, and authors.   Ridges are named for scientists who have contributed to the study of Mercury.   Depressions are named for works of architectures.   Escarpments (steep slope or long cliff) are named for ships or scientific expeditions.   Valleys are named for abandoned cities, town, or settlements of antiquity.   On average, Mercury is closer to Earth than Venus or Mars.   Because Mercury is so close to the Sun (36 million miles), the Hu...

    In radio astronomy, a fast radio burst (FRB), also known as a Lorimer Burst, is a transient radio pulse that lasts about a fraction of a millisecond.   It is one of the oddest puzzles of modern astronomy.   FRBs are rare, extremely bright flashed of light with radio wavelengths.   They put out more energy in one millisecond than the Sun puts out in 3 days.   FRBs are named by the date that the signal was recorded as “FRB YYMMDD”.   In most cases, the high frequency signal shows up first, followed by the low frequency signal.   This is known as dispersion.   It was estimated that 10,000 bursts a day was occurring and that 1,000 FRBs arrive at Earth each day. Astronomers were unsure how FRBs were generated.   Theories included supernova activity, colliding neutron stars, or neutron stars falling into black holes, or comets and asteroids slamming into neutron stars, or primordial black holes exploding.   There was even a theory...

      An exoplanet or extrasolar planet is a planet outside the Solar System.   As of April 1, 2021, there have been 4,1704 confirmed exoplanets in 3,478 star systems, with 770 systems having more than one planet.   The methods used to detect an exoplanet include transit photometry, radio velocity method, Doppler spectroscopy, and gravitational microlensing.   The least massive planet, named Draugr, is about twice the mass of the moon.   The most massive planet, named HR 2562, is about 30 times the mass of Jupiter.     The nearest exoplanets are located 4.2 light-years away and orbit Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Sun.   In 1988, the first suspected scientific detection of an exoplanet occurred, but not confirmed.   In 1990, observations were published that a planet orbited Gamma Cephei.  In 2003, improved techniques allowed the planet’s existence to be confirmed.  On January 9, 1992, the first c...

    Eta Carinae ( η Carinae) is a stellar system containing at least 2 stars within a nebula.   It was formerly known as Eta Argus in the early 19 th century.   Their combined luminosity (radiated power) is more than 5 million times that of the Sun.   The primary star was 250 times the mass of the Sun, but it has lost at least 30 solar masses recently and is expected to explode as a supernova.   It is the only star known to produce ultraviolet laser emission.   The second star is about 80 times as massive as the Sun.   130 years ago, the primary star exploded, but kept the star intact.   The original explosion created a huge 10-solar-mass cloud that expanded at more than 20 million miles per hour – fast enough to travel from Earth to Pluto in a few days.   [source: “Astronomers stunned again by Eta Carinae – the star that will not die,” Astronomy Now , Aug 3, 2018] The stellar system is located in the constellation Carina (between ...

  The Sun’s diameter is 864,000 miles, or 109 times that of Earth.   Over a million Earth’s can fit inside it.   Its mass is 330,000 times that of Earth.   The sun accounts for 99.8% of the total mass of the Solar System.   The Sun is made up of 73% hydrogen and 25% helium.   The rest of the mass is made up of oxygen, carbon, neon, and iron.   The sun formed about 4.6 billion years ago from the gravitational collapse within a region of a large molecular cloud.   It is considered a yellow dwarf (G-type main-sequence star – G2V) among stars.   However, its light is closer to white than yellow.   It appears yellow due to Earth’s atmosphere. The Sun’s core fuses about 600 million tons of hydrogen into helium every second.   It converts 4 million tons of matter into energy every second.   It takes between 10,000 and 170,000 years for the energy to escape from the core.   In 5 billion years, the Sun will transform into a...

  L3Harris Technologies, formerly Harris Corporation, was founded as an automatic press company in 1895.   The founder was Alfred S. Harris of Niles, Ohio.   For the next 60 years, they developed lithographic processes and printing presses.   In 1955, the company acquired the typesetting company called Intertype Corporation.   In 1962, the company merged with Radiation Inc of Melbourne, Florida.   Radiation Inc developed antennas and integrated circuits for the space program.   In 1978, the company headquarters moved from Cleveland to Melbourne, Florida.   In 2015, the company purchases Exelis Inc.    On June 19, 2019 Harris Corporation merged with L-3 Technologies, and the new company was called L3Harris Technologies, Inc.  In March 1997, a former civil servant (Izzy Rodriquez) had left San Antonio and Kelly AFB and went to work for Harris.   On March 30, I was recruited to work at Harris on information security and was ...