Slouch of the solar system
QUESTION Is it true that a day on Venus is longer than a year on the planet?
CALENDARS on Venus would be a mess. One day on Venus, i.e. the time taken for the planet to rotate once on its axis, is the equivalent of 243 days on Earth. It takes about 224.7 Earth days for the planet to make a complete orbit around the sun. Its day is not only longer than its year, but the longest day of the entire solar system.
In some ways, Venus is the planet in our solar system most like Earth because they are similar in size, density, composition and volume, although one difference is that Venus spins backwards.
This is called retrograde motion and, in a sense, means Venus’s north pole got swapped with its south pole. It flipped over. It’s not clear why this happened, although one idea that’s been proposed is a giant collision that skidded the planet’s spin to a halt.
The lazy rotation of Venus is still not completely understood. It rotates so slowly that, at its equator, a person could jog faster than the planet spins.
Emilie Lamplough, Wiltshire.
QUESTION When was the longest spell without rain in Ireland?
IT may seem incredible, given our normal weather, that Ireland used to be known for long periods without rain.
The most recent period of drought was nearly four years ago, in September 2014 when many parts of the country endured a drought. In the south, the southwest and the west, there was an absolute drought when little or no rain fell for much of that month. It had been the driest spell for close on 30 years.
The current heatwave could see drought conditions return, according to Met Éireann, which has a Status Yellow warning in place for Munster and Leinster.
Two earlier periods of drought had taken place in 1976 and 1995. In the 1976 drought, for a period of 60 days, the Met Éireann weather stations around the country had recorded only negligible amounts of rain. It came during an exceptionally fine summer.
While the drought in 1976 was worse than the one in 1995, the decreased river flows around the country at the end of the 1995 drought were comparable with those at the end of the 1976 drought. Periods of drought had happened at earlier periods in the 20th century: in the 1920s, the 1930s and the 1950s, and they were all much worse than the droughts of 1976 and 1995 and lasted for longer. At four points during the 19th century, very long droughts in the first decade of the 19th century – in the 1820s, the 1850s and the 1880s – all lasted for far longer than just the summer months.
A team in the geography department of Maynooth University have been working recently to create a detailed catalogue of droughts back to the middle 18th century, to ascertain the extent of droughts and the impact they had on communities in Ireland.
In 2016 Dr Conor Murphy of the
university’s uncovered Ireland drought, weather because said was patterns during documents that remarkably geography of the the while have past absence had been recently prone 40 department shown years unusual to of persistent Meteorology compiled, droughts. records, have existed professionally in Ireland 1880. Before for nearly then, 150 weather years, reports since were kept by amateur weather experts. But their reports were sufficiently detailed to provide accurate details of droughts back to the middle of the 18th century.
Reports of droughts earlier than that were much more sketchy, written up in annals of the time. Probably the worst drought in Irish history was in 1575, when intense heat and extreme drought were recorded for much of that year. It was said that from Bealtaine (May Day) to Lammas (August), there was no rain, by day or by night. Even earlier instances were reported of rivers totally drying up because of drought conditions. The Corrib in Galway completely dried up on three separate occasions, in 1178, 1191 and 1462, while the Liffey in Dublin completely dried up due to drought conditions in 1152.
We haven’t had a prolonged drought for many years now, so perhaps we should be grateful for the rain we do get!
John Keatley, Kildare.
QUESTION Peter Stringfellow’s youngest child was 52 years younger than his eldest. Was this a record?
FURTHER to the earlier answer, though he can’t beat the exploits of Julio Iglesias Sr (who had children 63 years apart), Anthony Quinn (1915-2001), Irish-Mexican Hollywood star of Zorba The Greek, Lust For Life, Viva Zapata!, The Guns Of Navarone and many more, came close.
Quinn’s first wife was the adopted daughter of Cecil B DeMille, the actress Katherine DeMille; they wed in 1937. The couple had five children, the first – Christopher – was born in 1939. Sadly he died aged two, drowned in a lily pond.
Quinn and DeMille divorced in 1965 following his affair with Italian costume designer Jolanda Addolori, with whom he had three children. He and Jolanda were married from 1966 to 1996.
During that time he had four children outside wedlock; two with an event producer in Los Angeles named Friedel Dunbar, and two by his secretary Katherine Benvin (47 years his junior); daughter Antonia Patricia Rose Quinn (born 1993) and son Ryan Nicholas Quinn (born 1996). Thus his youngest child was 57 years younger than tragic Christopher. Ed Mickleson, Hertfordshire.
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