Science

Quite simply it’s when we change the clocks to go forward for one hour on the final Sunday in March to signify British Summer Time and back one hour at the end of October.

The clocks going on one hour in March enables us to have more daylight in the evening.

It all started at the beginning of the 20th Century with a proposal from a British builder named William Willett, who happens to be the great-great-grandfather of Cold play’s Chris Martin.

The National History of Science at the Royal Observatory Greenwich stated that Mr Willett was incensed at the waste of daylight during the months of Spring and Summer.

As he was riding his horse through the Chislehurst and Petts Woods he was aware that many people were sleeping on even though the sun had been up for hours.

In 1916, British Summer Time was adopted to enable us to save fuel and money and get out in the sunshine for longer to improve our health.

Britain has thought of moving the clocks a number of times, even to the extent of forwarding the clocks by two hours ahead of GMT during the Second World War.

They have also been periods when the clocks were brought forward in the spring of 1947, which was to help with fuel shortages.

Britain even tried to experiment with keeping the clocks one hour ahead of GMT throughout the years of 1968 and 1971.

But they reverted back to our system of winter and summer times in March and October.

The ideas for clock-changing were first noted by Benjamin Franklin, one of the founding fathers of the US, in 1784.

He wanted to try and save candle usage and get people out and about to benefit from natural sunlight.

Then in 1895, over 100 years later, George Vernon Hudson a New Zealand entomologist suggested clocks be put forward two hours in the summer.

So the primary reason we use Daylight Saving Time is that people can simply enjoy long summer evenings in natural light, better for your health and energy conservation.

In 2019, the Daylight saving time (DST) in the United Kingdom began at 01:00 on Sunday, 31 March and ends at 02:00 on Sunday, 27 October.

In 2020, there will be a change of dates, as is the case every year, when the Daylight saving time in United Kingdom will begin at 01:00 on Sunday, 29 March and ends at 02:00 on Sunday, 25 October.

All of the quoted times for DST are in United Kingdom Time.

A super snow moon is when the moon is both at its fullest and and its perigee, which means the point in the moon’s orbit when it’s closest to Earth.

The super snow moon tends to occur during the month of February and was given its name thousands of years ago by Native Americans as that is when they had the most snow fall, it has also been known by the name, Hunger Moon and Storm Moon.

Because of the distance between the moon and Earth at this time, the moon appears 14 percent larger and around 30 percent brighter in the sky.

The moon’s orbit isn’t a perfect circle, it’s more egg-shaped and this is due to forces of gravity from both the sun and the Earth. This means that the moons distance from Earth varies throughout the year.

According to NASA, on the 19th February 2019, the super snow moon’s perigee will be about 362 miles (583 kilometres) closer to Earth than January’s 2019 super blood moon. The moon will be just 356,846 km away from the Earth, whilst the furthest full moon will occur on 14th September 2019 and will be 406,248 km away from our planet.

The best time to photograph or look at a super moon is when it rises in the east or as the sun is setting in the west. This is when the moon will appear to be at its biggest, although this is a kind of optical illusion.

Astronomers say that the illusion is caused by objects such as trees and buildings in our line of vision tricking our brain into thinking the moon is closer to these objects than they actually are, making the moon appear much larger.

On the other end of the scale, the point in its orbit when the moon is furthest away from Earth is known as the apogee,and this makes the moon appear much smaller in the sky.

We’ve all heard of DNA haven’t we, well this lady, Rosalind Franklin, was the first lady to start the research into it.

Rosalind Franklin was born in 1920 in London, and although her father disapproved of her going to university, she went to Cambridge and earned a PhD in physical chemistry.

The big unanswered question of that era was “What is the shape of DNA?”.

Even though scientists knew that DNA formed the building blocks of the body they had no idea what it looked like and so started Rosalind Franklin’s research in King’s College.

She spent many hours using an X-ray on delicate fibres of DNA, capturing a famous photo proving DNA is a double helix.

It is now understood that two other scientists named James Watson and Francis Crick were also trying to fathom out what DNA was made up of and they secretly looked at Rosalind Franklin’s research without her knowledge or permission.

They later published their findings along with Rosalind’s work and but crucially did not credit her.

After that incident Rosalind left King’s College and went to work at a top research lab, where she moved on to research the tobacco mosaic and polio viruses.

She also research the use of charcoal to be used in gas masks during WWII.

She died very young at the age of 37 years old from cancer in 1958.

Watson and Crick won a Nobel Prize four years later for their research and work into DNA, but it came to light that they had used some of Rosalind Franklin’s data and she is now known as one of the pioneer’s into the research of the “shape of DNA”.

Rather confusingly, a light year is actually a measurement of distance not time.

A light year shows the distance that light travels through a year, and travels at an incredible speed of 300,000 kilometres a second.  It is possible for a light year to travel around the circumference of the Earth 7.5 times per second.

So one light year measures just under 10 million kilometres.  On average it takes light 8.3 minutes to travel from the Sun to the Earth.

The nearest star is 4.2 light years away and the Andromeda Galaxy is the nearest large galaxy outside our own and is about 2.5 million light years away.

The Andromeda Galaxy can actually be seen from the United Kingdom and it has looks like an elongated fuzzy blob to the naked eye.

The Hubble Telescope has detected an object in space which is believed to be around 13.2 billion light years away.  In the time it’s taken the light to reach us on Earth the original object, a compact mini galaxy would no longer exist.

When a star dies, it does so in a spectacular way by a Supernova explosion.

This is what happened back in 1054 AD when ancient astronomers from China, Japan and Arabia witnessed such an explosion that lasted 23 days.

The remains of this supernova explosion can still be seen today and they named the remaining object “Crab Nebula”.

The core of a massive star which explodes is compacted into super dense objects known as a neutron star, and believe it or not this has a mass greater than the Sun, which is usually compacted into a sphere shape the size of a city.

A cup of neutron star material outweighs the largest mountain on Earth.

The Crab Nebula’s neutron star sends out an energetic beam of radiation and spins 30 times every second, and this type of object is known as a pulsar.  Here on Earth, we can usually see a pulse every time the beam spins past our line of sight.

A star’s colour will indicate it’s temperature, but unusually, it is opposite to what we use on Earth, as Red signifies the star at it’s coolest whilst blue shows the star at its hottest.  The star’s spectral type is the way astronomers classify a star’s colour and temperature.

The Crab Nebula is about 6,500 light-years away from the Earth, and is 5 light-years across.