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John Wenz

Verified
Wisconsin
As seen in: Inverse, MSN, MSN Australia, BBC, Color Research & Application, NBC News, The Atlantic, The Verge, WIRED Magazine, Ars Technica, Motherboard and
Science editor @inversedotcom. Former @knowablemag, @AstronomyMag and @PopMech. Opinions are my own & terrible. He / him. No good deed is commemorated here.
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Articles

April 21, 1994: The discovery of exoplanets

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By John Wenz Verified
| Astronomy Magazine Verified
The first exoplanets discovered were found orbiting the pulsar PSR B1257+12, imagined in this illustration. It took years for astronomers to find exoplanets around Sun-like stars. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech. On April 21, 1994, astronomers announced “unambiguous proof” of exoplanets, confirming research originally published in 1992. But these first-discovered planets outside our solar system didn’t come in any form scientists had anticipated.
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April 8, 1960: Frank Drake begins Project Ozma

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By John Wenz Verified
| Astronomy Magazine Verified
Frank Drake (second from left) stands in front of the 300-Foot Telescope at National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia, which featured heavily in his SETI research. Credit: NRAO/AUI/NSF, CC BY 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons In 1958, a newly minted Harvard Ph. D. named Frank Drake came to Green Bank. Usually he sought out typical radio astronomy targets — the Van Allen Belts around Earth, say, or the surface temperature of Venus, or the radiation belts of Jupiter.
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The Moon’s two different faces

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By John Wenz Verified
| Astronomy Magazine Verified
The same side of the Moon always faces us. This means that we never get a chance to see the other side of it unless a spacecraft flies there. If we could see it in the night sky, though, it would be like a whole different world. Where the lunar face we’re used to, the nearside, has deep craters known as mare, the farside has comparatively few large craters. Instead, it’s covered in a series of small craters, which makes it look a bit more like a golf ball. Why are the two sides different?
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