Air Quality

I compared Wayne Counties air to the air in Cook County, Illinois and San Diego County, California. The air was worse in Wayne than in Cook County. San Diego County was much worse than Wayne County. Surprisingly, when I compared Michigan's total air quality with the quality of New York's air, they were about the same. I thought that New York would have the most pollution. When I compared Michigan's air with Washington's air, i discovered that Washington's air was of better quality. I chose to visit Atlantic, New Jersey. The best time to visit would be any month. The only bad time to be there would be to visit would be December. This surprises me. I thought that the air quality would be worse during the summer, because of the amount of tourism they have that time of year. Today, on November 22nd, 2009 at 10:50, the best AQI is tied at 44 for the cities of Traverse City, Ludington and Houghton Lake. The city in Michigan with the worst AQI would be the city of Saginaw with 60.

http://airnow.gov/index.cfm?action=airnow.local_state&stateid=23&tab=1
http://www.epa.gov/aircompare/compare-trip.htm
A cross-agency U.S. Government Web site

Black Holes

Black holes are born when a massive star explodes, then forms a supernova. A fact about black holes is that they evaporate over time. Astronomers used to believe that black holes were impossible to destroy. We do not know what is inside of black holes. There are three types of black holes. One type is called a stellar-mass black hole. This type of black hole is heavier than the sun. Also, there are supermassive black holes. These black holes are about as heavy as a small galaxy. Another type of back hole is said to exist with a mass between stellar-mass and supermassive holes. My favorite type of black hole is the supermassive black hole. It is amazing to me that it has the mass of a small galaxy! Astronomers are researching the theory that black holes spin. They believe this because the things that black holes are made of spin, so the black hole as a whole, should spin. Another misconception is that black holes are possibly electrically charged. These are questions that Astronomers are trying to find a solution to.

http://hubblesite.org/explore_astronomy/black_holes/encyc_mod3_q4.html
Roeland van der Marel, STScI

Big Sunspot

People are interested in the group, Sunspot 1029 because it is the most active sunspot of 2009. It has trippled its amount of flairs in the last 10 months. The "deep solar minimum" has been described to be like the stock market. You don't believe it can go any lower, until it does. The number of sunspots is lowering. This is related to the Sunspot 1029 group, because sunspots are supposed to fluxuate dramatically over 10 year time spans, but we are worried that it is droppping too low. We care about sunspots on earth because they can affect the Earth's climate. They give off a solar wind, which affects our communications with space and satellites.




http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/980506a.html

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2009/01apr_deepsolarminimum.htm
http://spaceweather.com/