Answered Questions

I've just found out about something called WR 104, which is worrying me, can you explain this and help me out?

Don’t worry about WR 104; I will explain why in a moment. Your question is like others I receive, often several per day, that express a kind of cosmophobia — a fear of the cosmos. News stories about astronomical events are triggering widespread worry: fear of asteroid impacts, fear... More

Which planetarium in California allows me to view Planet X?

A planetarium is a device for projecting star fields and astronomical photos on the inside of a dome. It does not allow you to view anything other that the material that has been programmed into the show. I don’t think you will see “Planet X” included in current planetarium... More

We all hear exciting news about newly discovered exoplanets every week or so. I was wondering if Nasa plans to point some kind of big ears in the direction of these planets. I know Seti is searching the whole sky, but I guess it would probably be more efficient to search where we know there are planets.

There are now more than 350 known exoplanets, but so far no evidence that any are habitable. Almost all are giant planets, many either close to their star (hence very hot) or on highly elliptical orbits. Thus these are not very likely candidates for SETI searches. Once the Kepler mission... More

As dumb as earthlings are, how could we translate a message from other beings received by SETI? Also, what do you think they would try and tell us?

This is an excellent question, and one to which there is no clear technical answer. Please remember, however, that the sensitivity of current SETI searches is probably insufficient to pick up leakage — that is, to eavesdrop on the internal communications of another world. Such overheard conversations would probably not... More

dear sir,do u think human beings r the last evolution on planet earth,and why did the evolution stopped after we became humans?

Evolution has not stopped; it it happening all around us. The most obvious examples are in the evolution of drug resistant bacteria; this can happen in just a decade or two. We see the effects of evolution most clearly, of course, in populations (like bacteria) that reproduce quickly, so that... More

i was on the national geographic website and they said that in 2012 we are suppose to have the biggest solar storms in history. In the movie they said a solar flare would incinerate earth. I understand there's solar activity every 11 years ...but in the movie flares from the sun incinerated earth ...could that really happen?

A lot of people are asking about predictions of an unusually intense solar maximum 3 years from now. There is a huge amount of hype on the Internet, most of which (judging by the first 50 listings when I google “solar maximum 2012”) is inaccurate and irresponsible. Let’s look at... More

I've read that there is persistent irregularities in the orbits of Uranus and Neptune suggest some kind of mystery object is really there What is the main reason behind it?? is there any existance of dark star there ??

Irregularities (that is, departures from predictions) in the orbit of Uranus were used to predict the position of Neptune in the 18940s (see the Wikipedia article on the discovery of Neptune). Additional but much smaller departures of Uranus led to predictions of the existence of Pluto, but they turned out... More

I think it is well to assume that if it was confirmed by any government that an asteroid, planet, or any other ominous life ending event were approaching or even COULD approach... that society as we know it could likely breakdown. People would stop going to work, there would be riots, mass suicides, technology would collapse. So I think that in order to avoid total chaos (we all know what happned even as a result of a 1953 radio publication 'War of the Worlds'), governments might withhold information to prevent panic.

You have stated the standard rationale for withholding information very well. However, the facts don’t support this. The sort of mass panic you describe is common in Hollywood films but bears little relationship to the way people really behave in extreme circumstances. Consider, for example, the response of the population... More

Does the axis and orbit of the Earth effect the Earths climate, can this be another contribution to global warming?

Yes, the tilt of the Earth’s polar axis can have an effect on global temperatures, because it changes the distribution of heat depositied in the polar regions relative to the equator. The total amount of solar energy reaching the Earth does not change, but the distribution does make a small... More

I have been wondering a lot lately about aliens coming to visit us here on Earth. If they did, would the governments of our world keep it as a secret or would the information be spread right away?

It is hard for me to imagine that governments could keep such a secret even if they wanted to. Surely intelligent visitors would not reveal themselves only to one government, in any case. This is simply not something that could be kept secret. The same applies to almost anything in... More

Mr Morrison, tell me about the great ocean conveyor belt, I heard it in a few years will bring a new ice age, what are the risks, this is true?

Sunlight falls preferentially near the Earth’s equator. Atmospheric and ocean circulation redistributes the energy, carrying it from low latitudes to high latitudes. For millions of years there has been a fairly steady system of ocean currents that are sometimes called the “ocean conveyer belt”, in which water heated by the... More

I watch a lot of the science channel and discovery too, I have also spent a lot of time on the internet and all the global warming info or disinfo is really discouraging. Isn't the warming we are experiencing a cyclical trend that has happend in the past with the polar melts? Why is the whole warming thing being centered on people causing it? Isn’t it possible the World Leaders are taking advantage of a problem that could be unavoidable regardless of what we do, for revenue purposes?

I will try to clarify these issues. Yes, there have been cyclic changes in Earth’s temperature (such as the ice ages) with time-scales of tens of thousands of years. In dramatic contrast, the current global warming is happening on time-scales of decades. There are no external drivers for this heating... More

Eris moves fast. What is its speed, when compared to the planets in the solar system? When will it get close to earth and to sun?

I think perhaps you should look up “Eris” in Wikipedia before you send a question. Briefly, Eris does not move fast. It moves very slowly because it is so far from the Sun; its orbital period is 557 years. The suggestion that it is coming close to the Sun or... More

Why is Venus orange?

Venus is not orange; look at it in the sky and you will see that it is white with perhaps the slightest hint of yellow. What is orange is the color added to radar images of the surface, such as those obtained by the Magellan mission more than a decade... More

In many of your answers, you said to view the information Wikipedia has to offer, that Wikipedia has the correct content. Wikipedia is NOT a valid source to cite. If I turned in a paper to my college professor and used Wikipedia as a cited source, he/she would not even grade my paper. While Wikipedia can offer great information, it is not wise to tell others to use Wikipedia as a valid source of information.

I am sorry to hear that your college professors discourage reference to Wikipedia. I suspect that this has nothing to do with mistrust of the information in Wikipedia. Instead, I would guess that looking things up in Wikipedia is just too easy, and your professors want to teach you how... More

If Nibiru is a total hoax, and if NASA and the govt know about the great talk there is everywhere (internet, tv, press, etc) why don't you set a campaign to inform the public about these alleged false stories about Nibiru and the end of the world? ALSO if you feel that its hoax, then why dont from your side make a public announcement that nibiru is a hoax? and announce same through news channels?

It may surprise you, but I have not yet met a single scientist who has heard these stories about Nibiru and doomsday 2012. Similarly, I doubt if more than a handful of people in NASA have heard of this. I would not know about it either if I did not... More

Please kindly send the information about aliens and UFOs. ALSO Don’t you guys think its time to admit that somethings been visiting this earth for a very long time?

The best recent discussions of UFOs and alien visitations is in the special UFO issue of Skeptical Inquirer for January-February 2009 (Vol. 33 number 1). An excellent collection of older articles is in the book “The UFO Invasion” published by Prometheus in 1997. There is also an extended bibliography of... More

Given how little we know of the complexity of the universe and life itself as it relates to science. Why is evolution the only answer considered? How hard is it for scientists to accept that creation may be a pure science that we only have a small peice of ? If the quest for science is narrowed to a couple of hypothesies, then will our concuusions also lack in the full understanding?

Science is a way of looking at the world that is based on rationalism — the idea that the are universal natural laws, and that there is a relationship between cause and effect. The scientific approach has been remarkably successful, yielding an incredible expansion in our understanding of the the... More

I'm confused about how much of the information on asteroid impacts can be believed. At what mass does an colliding asteroid become globally unsurvivable? For survivable impacts, what would you recommend for seeking shelter (outside of the immediate impact zone)? AND I wanna know , If an Asteroid would hit us, would there be any way in surviving the impact, if it was large enough to warm are planet?

For information about the asteroid impact hazard see the NASA website (impact.arc.nasa.gov). For current information on discovery and orbits of near Earth asteroids (NEOs) see (neo.jpl.nasa.gov). There is a huge range of possibilities depending on the size of the asteroid that hit the Earth, but there is no near-Earth asteroid... More

how can we assume that the earth or anything else is millions of years old. carbon dating is unreliable and as far as I know none of my friends were around that long ago. some might mistakenly age my grandmother at millions of years old if in fact she weren't here to confirm otherwise.

The dating of rocks from the the slow transformation of one radioactive isotope to another began more than a century ago, when radioactivity itself was discovered. At first the results were rather crude, but over the decades they became more and more precise and repeatable, as we more accurately measured... More