If you Google "First day of of Spring" it will tell you March 20. But don't be fooled!

For many people in the US, the first day of spring will actually take place on March 19.

As it turns out, this year marks the earliest spring we've seen since 1896.

That's thanks to the fact that 2000 was a leap year, which was unusual since most century years, like 1700, 1800, and 1900, were not leap years.

Don't worry, there are no unnatural forces at work. It's simply a consequence of our imperfect Gregorian calendar system that can't quite account for Earth's annual revolution around the sun.

Long ago, our ancient human ancestors decided that spring officially began when the sun shone directly on Earth's equator (illustrated below). As a result, the first day of spring is sometimes referred to as the spring, or vernal, equinox.

However, there is one problem with establishing seasons based on Earth's movement through space, which is that the time it takes Earth to complete one revolution around the sun is not exactly 365 days.

In fact, it actually takes 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 45 seconds.

The Gregorian calendar tells us, however, that one year is equal to 365 days exactly — no more and no less. That is, unless we have a leap year, in which case it becomes 366 days.

Leap years are a great way to account for this discrepancy and keep our calendar, as well as our seasons, in check. Without leap years, we'd quickly fall out of step. Within 100 years our calendars would be 24 days off schedule.

Special exceptions

Hosting a leap year every four years, however, doesn't quite cut it. That's why there are two special exceptions:

1. There's no leap year at the turn of the century. The years 1700, 1800, and 1900 were not leap years, even though they fell within the regular 4-year cycle.
2. Unless the turn of the century is divisible by 400. This is why the year 2000 was a leap year.

"Our calendar system is set up in a 400 year cycle so that it makes up for all the little fractions that are left over since Earth doesn't spin in 365 and a quarter days," astronomer Bob Berman — who runs Overlook Observatory in New York and owns a giant book containing tens of thousands of past and future equinox dates — told Business Insider.

"What this tends to do," Berman continued, "is make leap days reset themselves so that the equinoxes and solstices all happen [on schedule]."

Berman is a regular guest on presentations hosted by Slooh, which is a collection of observatories around the world that stream live cosmic events online. Slooh will be hosting a special presentation on Sat. March 19 at 5 pm ET where Berman and other experts will discuss this year's unusually early spring equinox.

The big difference about the 21st century was that the year 2000 was a leap year. While this didn't affect our daily lives, it did make one difference:

"Instead of everything being reset so that all the dates of the equinoxes and solstices get knocked back to their usual dates ... that did not happen," said Berman.

The result is that the first day of spring will be moving to earlier times throughout this century.

This year, the spring equinox officially starts at 4:30 UT March 20, which means it will take place at 12:30 a.m. March 20 ET and 9:30 p.m. March 19 PT.

Before 2100 rolls around, it won't just be the US — everyone across the globe will experience spring equinoxes on March 19.

By the time we reach the 2300s, however, we'll be back on track and most spring equinoxes will fall on March 21st, again, according to Berman.

"This is all part of the plan to keep the dates from getting too far out of whack," Berman said. "And because of this, it really keeps everything accurate to about one day in 4,000 years. It's very impressive."

If you want to check out the Slooh presentation, tune in here, or below at 5 p.m. ET on Saturday, March 19:

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NOW WATCH: NASA just released awesome footage that has revolutionized our understanding of Mars

One of the reasons space exploration is so exciting is that there are so many possibilities – like powering a rocket to Mars in record time using nuclear reactions.

That's the rather outlandish plan being put together by Russian scientists, and it's one of the first to propose a solution to getting home from the Red Planet once we get there.

Existing schemes, including the ones scheduled by NASA for the 2030s, don't factor in the fuel or resources for a return trip, which means the first human settlers would have to live out the rest of their days there.

Previous proposals have also reckoned with a journey time of something like 18 months, which means astronauts are more at risk of contracting various diseases and ailments along the way.

It's actually Russia's national nuclear corporation, Rosatom, that has the big idea for a nuclear-powered spaceship, and it's not a completely new concept either: both Russia and the United States were working on similar systems during the Cold War of the 1960s and onward, although their efforts were focused on lightweight orbital satellites rather than space vehicles to take us to Mars and back again.

One of the biggest drawbacks is going to be the cost. "A nuclear contraption should not be too far off, not too complicated," Nikolai Sokov, senior fellow at the James Martin Centre for Nonproliferation Studies in California, told Wired. "The really expensive thing will be designing a ship around these things."

While Rosatom's representatives haven't gone into detail about how the company's technology will work, it's likely to be some form of thermal fission, where the heat of splitting atoms are used to burn hydrogen or another chemical, providing propulsion for the spaceship.

It's similar in principle to chemical propulsion, where one chemical (the oxidizer) burns another (the propellant) to power a vehicle along. The key difference with chemical propulsion is you need more and more fuel, which makes your vehicle heavier and heavier, a problem that thermal fission would solve.

If the Russian team is successful in its aims (and that's a big, huge "if"), the research could help improve orbiting satellite technology and perhaps contribute to the creation of a space junk collector on the edges of Earth's atmosphere.

"A vehicle equipped with a nuclear engine is expected to have 30 times the power reserve of conventional spaceships,"explains Rosatom. "The designs we are developing will enable mankind to build spaceships that can address all the space challenges of the 21st century, such as cargo transport, removal of space debris, asteroid impact avoidance, etc."

A prototype will be ready for flight testing in 2018, according to the company, if they can get the funds together. Nick Stockton from Wiredreports that Rosatom has only budgeted 15 billion rubles for the project (about US$700 million), which he calls "eyebrow-raisingly cheap for a 15-year long space project". For comparison, he adds, NASA's Space Launch System is projected to cost nearly $10 billion.

We'll just have to wait and see what those Russian rocket scientists have up their sleeves in the next few years.

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NOW WATCH: A robot was just sent to find life on Mars

Huddled in a coffee shop one drizzly Seattle morning six years ago, the astrobiologist Shawn Domagal-Goldman stared blankly at his laptop screen, paralyzed.

He had been running a simulation of an evolving planet, when suddenly oxygen started accumulating in the virtual planet’s atmosphere.

Up the concentration ticked, from 0 to 5 to 10 percent.

“Is something wrong?” his wife asked.

“Yeah.”

The rise of oxygen was bad news for the search for extraterrestrial life.

After millennia of wondering whether we’re alone in the universe — one of “mankind’s most profound and probably earliest questions beyond, ‘What are you going to have for dinner?’” as the NASA astrobiologist Lynn Rothschild put it — the hunt for life on other planets is now ramping up in a serious way.

Thousands of exoplanets, or planets orbiting stars other than the sun, have been discovered in the past decade. Among them are potential super-Earths, sub-Neptunes, hot Jupiters and worlds such as Kepler-452b, a possibly rocky, watery “Earth cousin” located 1,400 light-years from here.

Starting in 2018 with the expected launch of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers will be able to peer across the light-years and scope out the atmospheres of the most promising exoplanets. They will look for the presence of “biosignature gases,” vapors that could only be produced by alien life.

They’ll do this by observing the thin ring of starlight around an exoplanet while it is positioned in front of its parent star. Gases in the exoplanet’s atmosphere will absorb certain frequencies of the starlight, leaving telltale dips in the spectrum.

As Domagal-Goldman, then a researcher at the University of Washington’s Virtual Planetary Laboratory (VPL), well knew, the gold standard in biosignature gases is oxygen. Not only is oxygen produced in abundance by Earth’s flora — and thus, possibly, other planets’ — but 50 years of conventional wisdom held that it could not be produced at detectable levels by geology or photochemistry alone, making it a forgery-proof signature of life. Oxygen filled the sky on Domagal-Goldman’s simulated world, however, not as a result of biological activity there, but because extreme solar radiation was stripping oxygen atoms off carbon dioxide molecules in the air faster than they could recombine. This biosignature could be forged after all.

The search for biosignature gases around faraway exoplanets “is an inherently messy problem,” said Victoria Meadows, an Australian powerhouse who heads VPL. In the years since Domagal-Goldman’s discovery, Meadows has charged her team of 75 with identifying the major “oxygen false positives” that can arise on exoplanets, as well as ways to distinguish these false alarms from true oxygenic signs of biological activity. Meadows still thinks oxygen is the best biosignature gas. But, she said, “if I’m going to look for this, I want to make sure that when I see it, I know what I’m seeing.”

Meanwhile, Sara Seager, a dogged hunter of “twin Earths” at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is widely credited with inventing the spectral technique for analyzing exoplanet atmospheres, is pushing research on biosignature gases in a different direction. Seager acknowledges that oxygen is promising, but she urges the astrobiology community to be less terra-centric in its view of how alien life might operate — to think beyond Earth’s geochemistry and the particular air we breathe. “My view is that we do not want to leave a single stone unturned; we need to consider everything,” she said.

As future telescopes widen the survey of Earth-like worlds, it’s only a matter of time before a potential biosignature gas is detected in a faraway sky. It will look like the discovery of all time: evidence that we are not alone. But how will we know for sure?

Scientists must quickly hone their models and address the caveats if they are to select the best exoplanets to target with the James Webb telescope. Because of the hundreds of hours it will take to examine the spectrum for each planetary atmosphere and the many competing demands on its time, the telescope will likely only observe between one and three earthlike worlds in the habitable “Goldilocks” zones of nearby stars. In choosing from a growing list of known exoplanets, the scientists want to avoid planetary circumstances in which oxygen false positives arise. “We’re looking at maybe putting our eggs, if not all in one basket, at least in only a couple of baskets,” Meadows said, “so it’s important to try and figure out what we should be looking for there. And in particular, how we might get fooled.”

Breath of Life

Oxygen has been regarded as the gold standard since the chemist James Lovelock first contemplated biosignature gases in 1965, while working for NASA on methods of detecting life on Mars. As Frank Drake and other pioneers of astrobiology sought to detect radio signals coming from distant alien civilizations — an ongoing effort called the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) — Lovelock reasoned that the presence of life on other planets could be deduced by looking for incompatible gases in their atmospheres. If two gases that react with each other can both be detected, then some lively biochemistry must be continually replenishing the planet’s atmospheric supplies.

In Earth’s case, though it readily reacts with hydrocarbons and minerals in the air and ground to produce water and carbon dioxide, diatomic oxygen (O₂) comprises a steady 21 percent of the atmosphere. Oxygen persists because it is poured into the sky by Earth’s photosynthesizers — plants, algae and cyanobacteria. They enlist sunlight to strip hydrogen atoms off water molecules, building carbohydrates and releasing the oxygen byproduct as waste. If photosynthesis ceased, the existing oxygen in the sky would react with elements in the crust and drop to trace levels in 10 million years. Eventually, Earth would resemble Mars, with its carbon dioxide-filled air and rusty, oxidized surface — evidence, Lovelock argued, that the Red Planet does not currently harbor life.

But while oxygen is a trademark of life on Earth, why should that be true elsewhere? Meadows argues that photosynthesis offers such a clear evolutionary advantage that it is likely to become widespread in any biosphere. Photosynthesis puts the biggest source of energy on any planet, its sun, to work on the most commonplace of planetary raw materials: water and carbon dioxide. “If you want to have the uber-metabolism you will try and evolve something that will allow you to use sunlight, because that’s where it’s at,” Meadows said.

Diatomic oxygen also boasts strong absorption bands in the visible and near-infrared — the exact sensitivity range of both the $8 billion James Webb telescope and the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST), a mission planned for the 2020s. With so many imminent hopes riding on oxygen, Meadows is determined to know “where the gotchas are likely to be.” So far, her team has identified three major nonbiological mechanisms that can flood an atmosphere with oxygen, producing false positives for life. On planets that formed around small, young M-dwarf stars, for instance, intense ultraviolet sunlight can in certain cases boil down the planet’s oceans, creating an atmosphere thick with water vapor. At high altitudes, as VPL scientists reported in the journal Astrobiology last year, intense UV radiation splinters off the lightweight hydrogen atoms. These atoms then escape to space, leaving behind a veil of oxygen thousands of times denser than Earth’s atmosphere.

Because the smallness of M-dwarf stars makes it easier to detect much smaller, rocky planets passing in front of them, they are the intended targets for NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), a planet-finding mission scheduled to launch next year. The earthlike planets that will be studied by the James Webb telescope will be selected from among TESS’s finds. With these candidates on the way, astrobiologists must learn how to distinguish between alien photosynthesizers and runaway ocean boiling. In work that is now being prepared for publication, Meadows and her team show that a spectral absorption band from tetraoxygen (O₄) loosely forms when O₂molecules collide. The denser the O₂ in an atmosphere, the more molecular collisions occur and the stronger the tetraoxygen signal becomes. “We can look for the [O₄] to give us the telltale sign that we’re not just looking at a 1-bar atmosphere with 20 percent oxygen” — an earthlike atmosphere suggestive of photosynthesis — Meadows explained, “we’re looking at something that just has massive amounts of oxygen in it.”

A strong carbon monoxide signal will identify the false positive that Domagal-Goldman first encountered that drizzly morning in 2010. Now a research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., he says he isn’t worried about oxygen’s long-term prospects as a reliable biosignature gas. Oxygen false positives only happen in rare cases, he said, “and the planet that has those certain cases is also going to have observational properties that we should be able to detect, as long as we think about it in advance, which is what we’re doing right now.”

He and other astrobiologists are also mindful, though, of oxygen false negatives — planets that harbor life but have no detectable oxygen in their atmospheres. Both the false positives and false negatives have helped convince Sara Seager of the need to think beyond oxygen and explore quirkier biosignatures.

Encyclopedia of Gases

If the diverse exoplanet discoveries of the past decade have taught us anything, it’s that planetary sizes, compositions and chemistries vary dramatically. By treating oxygen as the be-all, end-all biosignature gas, Seager argues, we might miss something. And with a personal dream of discovering signs of alien life, the 44-year-old can’t abide by that.

Even on Earth, Seager points out, photosynthesizers were pumping out oxygen for hundreds of millions of years before the process overwhelmed Earth’s oxygen sinks and oxygen started accumulating in the sky, 2.4 billion years ago. Until about 600 million years ago, judged from a distance by its oxygen levels alone, Earth might have appeared lifeless.

Meadows and her collaborators have studied some alternatives to oxygenic photosynthesis. But Seager, along with William Bains and Janusz Petkowski, are championing what they call the “all-molecules” approach. They’re compiling an exhaustive database of molecules — 14,000 so far — that could plausibly exist in gas form. On Earth, many of these molecules are emitted in trace amounts by exotic creatures huddled in ocean vents and other extreme milieus; they don’t accumulate in the atmosphere. The gases might accrue in other planetary contexts, however. On methane-rich planets, as the researchers argued in 2014, photosynthesizers might harvest carbon from methane (CH₄) rather than CO₂and spew hydrogen rather than oxygen, leading to an abundance of ammonia. “The ultimate, long-term goal is [to] look at another world and make some informed guesses as to what life might produce on that world,” said Bains, who splits his time between MIT and Rufus Scientific in the United Kingdom.

Domagal-Goldman agrees that thinking both deeply about oxygen and broadly about all the other biochemical possibilities is important. “Because all these surprises have happened in our detections of the masses and radii and orbital properties of these other worlds,” he said, “[astronomers] are going to keep pushing on the people like me who come from an earth sciences background, saying, ‘Let’s think further outside the box.’ That is a healthy and necessary pressure.”

Meadows, however, questions the practicality of the all-molecules approach. In a 3,000-word email critiquing Seager’s ideas, she wrote, “After you build this exhaustive database, how do you identify those molecules that are most likely to be produced by life? And how do you identify their false positives?” She concluded: “You will still have to be guided by life on Earth, and our understanding of planetary environments and how life interacts with those environments.”

In contemplating what life might be like, it’s exasperatingly difficult to escape the only data point we have — for now.

Uncertain Odds

At a 2013 symposium, Seager presented a revised version of the Drake equation, Frank Drake’s famous 1961 formula for gauging the odds that SETI would succeed. Whereas the Drake equation multiplied a string of mostly unknown factors to estimate the number of radio-broadcasting civilizations in the galaxy, Seager’s equation estimates the number of planets with detectable biosignature gases. With the modern capacity to look for any life regardless of whether it’s intellectually capable of beaming messages into space, the calculation of our chances of success no longer depends on uncertainties like the rareness of intelligence as an evolutionary outcome or the galactic popularity of radio technology. However, one of the biggest unknowns remains: the probability that life will arise in the first place on a rocky, watery, atmospheric planet like ours.

“Abiogenesis,” as the mystery event is called, seems to have occurred not long after Earth accumulated liquid water, leading some to speculate that life might start up readily, even inevitably, under favorable conditions. But if so, then shouldn’t abiogenesis have happened multiple times in Earth’s 4.5-billion-year history, spawning several biochemically distinct lineages rather than a monoculture of DNA-based life? John Baross, a microbiologist at the University of Washington who studies the origins of life, explained that abiogenesis might well have happened repeatedly, creating a menagerie of genetic codes, structures and metabolisms on early Earth. But gene-swapping and Darwinian selection would have merged these different upstarts into a single lineage, which has since colonized virtually every environment on Earth, preventing new upstarts from gaining ground. In short, it’s virtually impossible to tell whether abiogenesis was a fluke event, or a common occurrence — here, or elsewhere in the universe.

Scheduled to speak last at the symposium, Seager set a light-hearted tone for the after party. “I put it all in our favor,” she said, positing that life has a 100 percent chance of arising on Earth-like planets, and that half of these biospheres will produce detectable biosignature gases — another uncertainty in her equation. Crunching these wildly optimistic numbers yielded the prediction that two signs of alien life would be found in the next decade. “You’re supposed to laugh,” Seager said.

Meadows, Seager and their colleagues agree that the odds of such a detection this decade are slim. Though the prospects will improve with future missions, the James Webb telescope would have to get extremely lucky to pick a winner in its early attempts. And even if one of its targeted planets does harbor life, spectral measurements are easily foiled. In 2013, the Hubble Space Telescope monitored the starlight passing through the atmosphere of a midsized planet called GJ 1214b, but the spectrum was flat, with no chemical fingerprints at all. Seager and her collaborators reported in Nature that a high-altitude layer of clouds appeared to have obscured the planet’s sky from view.

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NOW WATCH: 40 years ago, NASA sent a message to aliens — here's what it says

The early Solar System was a much different place than it is now.

Chaos reigned supreme before things settled down into their present state.

New research shows that the young Sun was more chaotic and expressive than it is now, and that Earth’s magnetic field was key for the development of life on Earth.

Researchers at the Harvard Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics have been studying a star called Kappa Ceti, about 30 light years away in the Cetus constellation.

Kappa Ceti is in many ways similar to our own Sun, but it’s estimated to be between 400 million to 600 million years old, about the same age as our Sun when life appeared on Earth.

Studying Kappa Ceti gives scientists a good idea of the type of star that early life on Earth had to contend with.

Kappa Ceti, at its young age, is much more magnetically active than our 4.6 billion year old Sun, according to this new research.

It emits a relentless solar wind, which the research team at Harvard says is 50 times as powerful as the solar wind from our Sun.

It’s surface is also much more active and chaotic. Rather than the sunspots that we can see on our Sun, Kappa Ceti displays numerous starspots, the larger brother of the sunspot.

And the starspots on Kappa Ceti are much more numerous than the sunspots observed on the Sun.

We’re familiar with the solar flares that come from the Sun periodically, but in the early life of the Sun, the flares were much more energetic too.

Researchers have found evidence on Kappa Ceti of what are called super-flares. These monsters are similar to the flares we see today, but can release 10 to 100 million times more energy than the flares we can observe on our Sun today.

So if early life on Earth had to contend with such a noisy neighbor for a Sun, how did it cope? What prevented all that solar output from stripping away Earth’s atmosphere, and killing anything alive? Then, as now, the Earth’s electromagnetic field protected it.

But in the same way that the Sun was so different long ago, so was the Earth’s protective shield. It may have been weaker than it is now.

The researchers found that if the Earth’s magnetic field was indeed weaker, then the magnetosphere may have been only 34% to 48% as large as it is now.

The conclusion of the study says “… the early magnetic interaction between the stellar wind and the young Earth planetary magnetic field may well have prevented the volatile losses from the Earth exosphere and created conditions to support life.”

Or, in plain language: “The early Earth didn’t have as much protection as it does now, but it had enough,” says Do Nascimento.

Evidently.

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NOW WATCH: NASA can't explain why an island on this mysterious moon has disappeared

I'll admit, I cry at everything from sappy commercials to photogenic dogs playing in the park.

So it's no surprise why a trailer for NASA's IMAX documentary, "A Beautiful Planet," had me tearing up at my desk.

The movie, filmed in space and narrated by Jennifer Lawrence, shows us here on Earth what it's like to live on the International Space Station.

Many astronauts report feeling the "overview effect" in space. It's the experience of seeing Earth from above that leaves astronauts feeling awestruck and gives them a newfound appreciation for the world as a fragile planet that we share.

With this new doc, NASA's hoping we feel that way, too — and possibly inspire us to do more to protect our only home in the solar system. It fittingly comes to theaters on Earth Day, April 29.

Grab a tissue just in case, and watch the full trailer:

And if you need more than that to make you tear up, try this on for size.

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NOW WATCH: Astronaut Scott Kelly who spent a year in space reveals what he missed most about Earth

Are you obsessed with science? Do you have a knack for translating complex ideas into stories for a general audience? Do you find yourself full of story ideas, ranging from photo features on the latest consumer genetics test to deep dives into the status of space exploration?

Business Insider is looking for a talented editor to join our science team. This person will focus on a range of topics, from space and engineering to health, fitness, and nutrition.

As our science editor, you’ll manage a team of reporters and interns who are as obsessed and talented as you are. In addition to editing, planning content, coming up with story ideas, writing will be a top priority.

Apply if:

• You thrive in a fast-paced, collaborative setting.
• You have experience managing and inspiring a team.
• You know how to stay on top of a beat and quickly produce awesome, high-impact stories.
• You can decrypt complex developments and make science exciting for a general audience.
• You can bring unique context to trending news and make those stories your own.

Our style is smart, conversational, and geared toward non-scientists. Careful attention to detail and an ability to be efficient in a quick-turnaround environment are skills that are absolutely required for this job. We also prize agility in and enthusiasm for tackling wildly different topics — from the latest fitness trends to the growing problem of climate change to new developments in space and medicine.

Our aim is to help readers engage with the world around them in as many smart, creative ways as possible. Science is everywhere.

As the leader of a small team, talents for efficient delegation and guidance are key. The role will also help the team establish and nurture productive, attention-grabbing beats.

While this position has regular office hours, the ideal candidate is always keeping an eye out for the next big story. After-hours duties may also include helping retain our Science Friday trivia champion title over rival publications.

Apply here if interested. Please include a resume, clips, and a cover letter telling us what excites you about science reporting.

Business Insider offers competitive compensation packages complete with benefits. This is a full-time position based in our NYC office.

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NOW WATCH: ‘Mythbusters' aired its last episode — here’s the toughest myth host Adam Savage ever busted

For the past two years, British celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal has been preparing food he would never consider serving in his restaurant. 

These latest dishes, Blumenthal says, are also some of the most difficult he's ever made. And the most expensive.

Why?

Blumenthal has been cooking for an astronaut. European Space Agency astronaut Tim Peak, who's currently living on the International Space Station, to be precise.

And during his six-month stay aboard the ISS, Peak is enjoying world-class meals prepared specially for him by Blumenthal. The meals took two years to prepare and perfect and cost tens of millions of dollars to launch into space.

Before Peak went to space, he and chef Blumenthal spent a lot of time together discussing the different foods Peak wanted to eat during his stay, The Guardian reported in its excellent write-up of Blumenthal's full experience.

One such meal was a simple bacon sandwich. This sandwich would turn out to be the bane of Blumenthal's entire project.

'It all had to go in a can'

Apparently, building a bacon sandwich for space is far more difficult than making sausages, mashed potatoes, Thai red curry, and even Key lime pie — just a few of the other tasty items on Peak's dinner menu.

Part of the problem was the packaging process, Blumenthal told The Guardian:

“The bacon, the bread, the butter, everything — it all had to go in a can."

Another issue with the bacon sandwich was the cooking process. Space agencies are very particular about the food their astronauts eat — their main concern being harmful bacteria that could make one sick. 

To make sure foods are as safe as possible, Blumenthal had to cook his bacon sandwich — along with all of the other meals he made for Peak — at 140 degrees for two straight hours before sending them to space.

Needless to say, your standard strips of bacon weren't going to cut it under those harsh baking conditions.

In the end, Blumenthal employed the help of sous chefs at the canning factory in France who were in charge of packaging his products for space.

The taste

After endless tests, this was the final product, as described by The Guardian's Tom Lamont, who got to taste one:

"It was made with dense, sticky brown bread, tough lobes of bacon placed between grouting-like layers of a thick lard-like butter. It was small — about the shape and thickness of a Starbucks coffee lid. I was allowed to try one. Heavy work on the jaw. Definitely a tang of the supermarket BLT."

The verdict?

"But honestly pretty good," Lamont wrote.

Blumenthal chronicles his two-year experience cooking for an astronaut in a recent Channel 4 documentary.

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NOW WATCH: NASA just released awesome footage that has revolutionized our understanding of Mars

Earth feels pretty large, and we feel pretty tiny living on it.

But we rarely, if ever, stop to think about the vast beyond. And we should!

Former astronomer Carl Sagan wrote in his book "Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space":

There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

So just how small is Earth compared with the rest of outer space? These photos will help put our planet in perspective.

This humbling photo, taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft in 2013, shows what Earth, indicated by the tiny white arrow, looks like from 898 million miles away.

NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center

Here, North America is superimposed next to Jupiter's Great Red Spot. As you can see in this to-scale image, Jupiter's giant storm would completely swallow the entire continent.

Courtesy of John Brady, who founded the blog Astronomy Central.

Saturn's rings are a beautiful spectacle of the cosmos, but they look much better on Saturn than on Earth.

Courtesy of John Brady, who founded the blog Astronomy Central.

In the early morning of March 17, hours before the Saint Patrick’s Day festivities began, the skies of Britain were lit up by a bright blue-green meteor.

The fireball was spotted at around 3.16 a.m. local time across England in parts of the east coast, Stafford, Hampshire, and Battersea in south west London.

The meteor was also a particularly bright one. The Guardian reports that it is the brightest meteor ever recorded by the UK Meteor Observation Network (UKMON), estimated to have a brightness of -7 magnitude, and an explosion magnitude of -14.

Meteors can glow a variety of colors depending on their metal composition – yellow, orange, green, blue, or lilac. The blue-green color of this meteorite suggests it contained large concentrations of magnesium.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to tell the color of the meteor’s streak in the captured imagery as most of the footage is in black and white. However, sightings of the flash and its green tinge prompted many stargazers to tweet about the "St Patrick's Day meteor."

According to a tweet by UKMON, they calculated the orbit of the meteor as originating beyond Jupiter, although they are currently working on a more precise estimation.

"This is the biggest meteor sighting we have recorded," Richard Kacerek from UKMON told BBC News. "It lasted for a few seconds. It was seen for hundreds of miles. We have received a number of emails."

In fact, sightings and interest in the green flash were so high it caused the UKMON websiteto crash with all the traffic. Either that, or their astronomers had too many pints of Guinness.

READ MORE: Astronomers discovered unexpected activity on a giant asteroid that could point to something huge

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NOW WATCH: NASA scientists can’t explain this unusual 270-mile-wide ‘bite mark’ on Pluto’s surface

On Monday and Tuesday this week, two comets will zip past Earth, with one of them coming closer to our planet than any comet since 1983.

And the larger, but more distant, of the two is becoming so bright, scientists believe that at its closest point, it might be visible in the night sky with the naked eye.

The smaller comet, Comet P/2016 BA14, won't be quite so obvious, but it'll pass by us at a distance of just 3.5 million km (2.2 million miles), making it the third closest flyby of a comet in recorded history.

To be clear, that's still more than nine times further away than the Moon, so there's no chance the comet will hit us (and in case you had any doubts, NASA uses the word "safely" five times in its press release).

Still, the event is sure to make for some pretty spectacular skywatching, and it could also teach us a lot about how comets work.

"Comet P/2016 BA14 is not a threat,"clarified Paul Chodas, manager of NASA's centre of Near Earth Object (NEO) Studies. "Instead, it is an excellent opportunity for scientific advancement on the study of comets."

What's so special about these two comets is that scientists don't really know how - or even if - they're related. Also, having two comets passing us so closely within a day of each other is an incredibly rare occurrence.

"There are many more asteroids in near-Earth space than comets, which are significantly more rare," Michael Kelley, an astronomer at the University of Maryland, told The LA Times."When a comet does come this close to Earth it is something to get excited about, and take advantage of to learn whatever we can."

The larger comet is called Comet 252P/LINEAR, and was first discovered back in 2000, and has been monitored ever since.

But comet P/2016 BA14 was only spotted in January this year, and at first, astronomers thought it was a potentially dangerous asteroid heading towards us.

But when they saw the crossover in the two objects' flyby dates, they decided to investigate further, and found that P/2016 BA14 actually has a tail, which means it's not a big chunk of rock or metal, like an asteroid, but a mix of dust and rock frozen together into a solid mass, AKA a comet.

The orbits of the two comets aren't identical, as you can see in the image below, but they're similar enough to suggest that they're somehow linked - one of the leading hypotheses so far is that comet P/2016 BA14, is a fragment that broke away from the larger comet at some point.

But what's getting people really excited is that Comet 252P/LINEAR is already around 100 times brighter than expected, and is getting close to the point it'll be visible with the naked eye.

Although it won't be getting as close to us as P/2016 BA14, it'll still pass by at a snug distance of 5.2 million km (3.3 million miles), which makes it the fifth closest comet in recorded history.

Comet 252P/LINEAR is also a very pretty shade of green, because of the release of diatomic carbon (C2), a gas that glows green when its molecules become ionised.

For those of you wanting to watch at home, there's good and bad news. Unfortunately, unless you're in the Southern Hemisphere, Comet 252P/LINEAR isn't going to be visible to you at its closest point.

Even worse, the closest approach occurs at 9.14am EDT on March 21 (12.14am AEST on March 22), two nights before the full moon, so even if you're in the Southern Hemisphere, you might struggle to see it because it's such a large and hazy object that can easily be washed out by the Moon's light.

The good news is that the Virtual Telescope Project will be hosting live broadcasts showing the flyby of both the comets on March 21 and 22. Comet P/2016 BA14 will make its closest approach at around 11.30am EDT on March 22 (2.30am AEST on March 23), so you should have the chance to see the comets zip through the night sky from the comfort of your own home.

And if Comet 252P/LINEAR stays bright for the next couple of weeks, people in both hemispheres will have the chance to spot it. There's also the possibility that a weak meteor shower will follow on March 28 as Earth crosses the dust trailing in the comet's orbit.

Either way, the global astronomy community will have their best telescopes trained on the pair - including the Hubble Space Telescope, so over the next few weeks we should learn a lot more about them.

It's a good time to be watching the skies.

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Tomorrow morning, we’re set to experience a penumbral lunar eclipse, where the full moon moves into Earth’s shadow to ever-so-slightly darken the night sky.

It’s a cool event to look out for, but only those of you with the keenest eyesight will be able to see the darkening of the Moon - penumbral lunar eclipses are nowhere near as dramatic as total lunar eclipses.

But there’s a reason for you to try - at the height of Wednesday's penumbral eclipse at 7:48am ET (6:48am CT, 10:48pm AEST), Jupiter will be much brighter than usual, and after having made its closest approach to the Moon on Monday, it will look like a big, bright star right next to the slightly dimmed full moon (so get your cameras ready).

It’s expected that during this time, Jupiter’s brightness will hit a -2.5 magnitude, and the full moon, even during the eclipse, will still be extremely bright at -12.4 magnitude.

To put those numbers in perspective, the Sun has an apparent magnitude of -27, the full moon -13, the brightest planet Venus measures -5, and Sirius, the brightest visible star in the night sky, is at -1.5. 

If you’re keen on watching it, people in the central and western United States will be in the best position to see the slightly darkened Moon, but parts of eastern Australia, New Zealand, Japan, central and eastern Asia, and the Pacific could also catch a glimpse of the phenomenon. 

The eclipse is expected to last for 4 hours and 15 minutes on Wednesday morning (March 23), during which time at least part of the southern portion of the Moon will be have moved with the pale penumbra - the faint outer shadow of Earth - Joe Rao reports for Space.com.

"About that time, even a casual observer - if he or she is looking hard enough - should be able to note a slight diminution of light corresponding to a ‘smudged' or ‘soiled’ appearance of the Moon’s lower limb," he says.

So what exactly is a penumbral lunar eclipse? The name refers to when the Moon moves into the outer part of Earth’s shadow, rather than the through all or part of the main shadow, which is when partial and total lunar eclipses occur.

Blaine Friedlander explains for The Washington Post:

"Earth produces two kinds of shadows: umbral and penumbral. As the Moon slides through the dark part of Earth’s shadow (umbral), the Moon turns a copper-like red and that event can be quite pronounced. When the Moon moves through the outer shadow - the penumbral shadow - the eclipse features are less pronounced. In this case, it’s the outer, outer shadow."

The next total lunar eclipse won't occur until 31 January 2018, and the next penumbral lunar eclipse is set for September this year, but the US won’t be able to see that one, so set your alarms and wake up early to see just how much of this curious event you can make out.

Even if you just spot a super-bright Jupiter chilling alongside a full moon, that's a better start to the day than most!

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The first lunar eclipse of 2016 will take place on Tuesday, March 23. A lunar eclipse takes place when the Earth passes between the Moon and sun. If space were flat, we'd witness a lunar eclipse once a month, but we normally only see two lunar eclipses a year. This brilliant NASA video explains why.

Video courtesy of NASA

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NASA recently captured the "shockwave breakout" of red super giant more than 1.2 billion light-years from us. It was taken by the Kepler telescope in space.

Produced by Kevin Reilly. Video courtesy of NASA.

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If you read or watch any science fiction at all, you probably know that one of the most perilous parts of any space travel is the extreme cold of deep space: As soon as an astronaut is exposed to the vacuum, they freeze solid.

But depending on where in the universe the story is taking place, that danger might be overstated.

If you're way, way out in the universe, too far from stars and galaxies to catch any light whatsoever, yes, it's mind-bogglingly cold. Scientists estimate that the coldest place in the universe might get down to minus-454 degrees Fahrenheit.

But since present-day astronauts stick close to home, light from the sun can push temperatures to 250 degrees or more. The iconic white suits astronauts wear for spacewalks reflect light, keeping them (relatively) cool.

So when you're watching a fingernail-biting spacewalk in the next big space flick, remember that your protagonist may be freezing, but actual space-walkers face an entirely different danger.

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At one point or another most of us have wondered whether aliens really do exist. Here are some haunting scientific reasons why we haven't yet discovered extraterrestrial life.

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The northern lights here on Earth might seem otherworldly, but the ones on Jupiter are truly out of this world.

In a study published in Journal of Geophysical Research – Space Physics, researchers announce that they have observed the effects of a solar storm on Jupiter's aurora, the planet's version of our northern lights. It's the first time the interaction between Jupiter's aurora and a solar storm, also known a a coronal mass ejection or CME, has been observed.

Auroras occur when charged particles interact with a planet's magnetic field. On Earth, the aurora, caused by particles from the solar wind interacting with the atmosphere, occurs in visible light (the greens and reds seen in the Northern lights), but on Jupiter, much of the aurora is in the form of x-rays, visible to instruments, but not human eyes. The image above is a composite image, showing a photo of the planet overlaid with the x-ray aurora in purple and white.

In the new study, researchers observed a strong increase in power in the aurora when particles from a large solar storm reached Jupiter in 2011. During the storm, the aurora was eight times brighter than normal, and featured an x-ray hotspot (the white dot) that pulsed much more frequently than usual. After the storm passed, the aurora went back to normal. Researchers are still looking into the data for more information, which could help give us a deeper understanding of auroras here on Earth, as well as on planets well outside our solar system.

“We want to understand this interaction and what effect it has on the planet,” William Dunn said. “By studying how the aurora changes, we can discover more about the region of space controlled by Jupiter’s magnetic field, and if or how this is influenced by the Sun. Understanding this relationship is important for the countless magnetic objects across the galaxy, including exoplanets, brown dwarfs and neutron stars.”

This isn't the first time researchers have studied Jupiter's aurora. Researchers have captured images of Jupiter's aurora since the Voyager spacecraft took pictures of the planet in 1979, but are now getting an even better sense of what drives aurora's on the solar system's largest planet.

Jupiter has the largest aurora in the solar system, hundreds of times more powerful than Earth's, but other planets have auroras too. The northern lights on Mars are probably blue, and researchers have even found evidence of auroras on objects outside our solar system.

This article originally appeared on Popular Science.

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NASA's dawn spacecraft has been taking photos of the fascinating dwarf planet Ceres. Here's some of the planet's most interesting features. 

Produced by Grace Raver. Footage courtesy of NASA.

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The European Space Agency recently announced plans for an international moon base. The agency believes they could start building the complex in 20 years, with different countries focusing on their areas of expertise.

Produced by Matt Stuart. Video courtesy European Space Agency.

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Astronomers have discovered enormous, new galaxies they call "Super Spirals." These galaxies are so enormous, they are beyond our understanding. 

Produced by Ruchika Agarwal and Jessica Orwig

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Space may be a giant airless vacuum, but astronauts swear that it has an odor.

Those who have sniffed the aroma liken it to burning metal, steak, and welding, among other peculiar olfactory memories.

"Space has its own unique smell," NASA astronaut Scott Kelly said in PBS' Year in Space documentary. "Whenever a vehicle docks, the smell of space when you open up the hatch is very distinct."

Astronauts obviously can't smell space when they're in it (they'd suffocate). But astronaut Don Pettit described what fellow crew members smelled like when they returned from space walks in a NASA blog post:

It was more pronounced on fabrics than on metal or plastic surfaces. It is hard to describe this smell; it is definitely not the olfactory equivalent to describing the palette sensations of some new food as "tastes like chicken." The best description I can come up with is metallic; a rather pleasant sweet metallic sensation. It reminded me of my college summers where I labored for many hours with an arc welding torch repairing heavy equipment for a small logging outfit. It reminded me of pleasant sweet smelling welding fumes. That is the smell of space.

Louis Allamandola, director of the Astrophysics and Astrochemistry Lab at NASA's Ames Research Center, told Popular Science that this smell is due to the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons floating around in space.

These hydrocarbons can be found in "tobacco smoke, car exhaust, and sometimes in heavily browned foods," here on Earth, according to chemist Kevin Boudreaux from Angelo State University.

NASA Science News has another explanation: Materials once exposed to the vacuum of space can react strongly with oxygen pumped back into a spacecraft. When you burn materials in air, the same process occurs — it's called oxidation — just at a much faster rate. So this might help explain the "burnt" character of the smell.

You can see crew on the International Space Station experience the smell when the Japanese cargo vehicle arrives in PBS' Year in Space documentary. It starts at 36:54:

DNews also has a great compilation of what astronauts say space smelled like to them in this YouTube video:

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