Labour’s persistent failure to address its electorate’s salient concerns is behind the protest vote, asserts DIANE ABBOTT
Latest editorial
The stars that tell us about ourselves
Tonight you can see the best shooting stars of the year, but what can they tell us about our place in the universe?
Often, the locations of falling meteorites are predicted by looking at the trajectories of a group of shooting stars
Washington’s lawless behaviour towards countries in the region it considers its ‘back yard’ should be condemned by all law-abiding people, says LUKE DANIELS
In part I of a serialisation of his new book, JOHN McINALLY takes a look at the early days of organising government workers
Colombia’s success in controlling the drug trade should be recognised and its sovereignty respected, argues Dr GLORY SAAVEDRA
The shadow lord chancellor has recently made a name for himself as an rabid hater of immigration – but there are exceptions to every rule, says SOLOMON HUGHES
Plaid Cymru’s front-bench spokesman on health and social services MABON AP GWYNFOR, in a two-part series, analyses the Caerphilly by-election and the wider political scene in Wales ahead of the 2026 Senedd election
TONIGHT is one of the best nights of the year for shooting stars, as we go through the huge annual meteor shower called the Perseids.
Shooting stars are what we see as small objects travelling through space collide with the Earth’s atmosphere. The speed of their movement through the air causes so much friction that they burn up in a fireball. These meteors, some of which are no bigger than a grain of sand and travel 15 times faster than a high-powered rifle bullet, often burn up 60 miles up in the sky, well before they reach the Earth’s surface. However, some larger meteors fall all the way to Earth, leaving a meteorite — the space rock itself.
There are so many tiny fragments of rock from space colliding with Earth and its atmosphere that every year they increase the Earth’s mass by 20,000 tons, (although this is infinitesimal compared to the weight of the Earth which is twenty million billion times heavier than this). This perpetual rain of small objects from space isn’t so scary, but on rare occasions in Earth’s history, some rather larger objects have arrived: the “Chicxulub impactor” object often blamed for the extinction of many dinosaurs 66 million years ago is thought to have had a mass of at least one trillion tons.
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