Burglars call cops in error
Our expert explains why 2021 will have an added bonus for us
THE “world’s unluckiest burglars” have been arrested after accidentally calling the police on themselves.
Staffordshire Police arrested two men in the Middleport area of Stoke- on- Trent on suspicion of burglary after receiving a “suspicious call” on Wednesday evening.
In a tweet yesterday, Chief Inspector John Owen revealed: “I think we have just arrested the world’s unluckiest burglars:
“Whilst committing a burglary one of the bungling burglars has accidentally sat on his phone & dialled 999.
“We received a call detailing all of their antics up to the point of hearing our patrols arrive to arrest them”
The two men, aged 49 and 42, were still in custody
from Glasgow Science Centre, explains Perihelion, and why we can look forward to a long summer in 2021.
2020 was a long year. Or at least it certainly felt that way. Looked at from a cosmic perspective though, last year was the same as any other.
The Earth spun and wheeled around the sun at a leisurely 19 miles every second. This year will be the same as last year, astronomically speaking: our planet’s orbit undisturbed by the goings- on on its surface.
While January 1 marked the new year in our calendar, January 2 is a more astronomically significant date. On January 2, 2021 Earth reached perihelion, its closest approach to the sun.
At first glance this might seem confusing – we’re in the depths of winter after all. But remember that our southern hemisphere cousins are in the middle of their summer. In fact, the Earth’s distance from the sun isn’t related to how hot or cold we are, or to our seasons.
The seasons occur because our planet’s axis of rotation is tilted slightly. We are listing at an angle of 23.5 degrees from the upright. This tilt means that sometimes our part of the planet is tilted towards the sun, giving us summer, and sometimes away from the sun, in winter. You’ll be glad to know that we’re heading out of winter now, to the sunlit uplands of a new spring.
On top of our axial tilt, our orbit around the sun is a bit wonky too. It’s not a perfect circle; it’s an ellipse, which is the name we give a slightly squashed circle. This means that sometimes we’re a bit closer to the sun in our orbit, and sometimes a little further away.
The fact that planetary orbits are not circular was discovered by the German astronomer Johannes Kepler, a contemporary of Galileo. The fact that the planets orbited the sun at all was a relatively new concept in the early 17th century. The Polish mathematician Nicolaus Copernicus had shown a few decades earlier that, yes, in fact, the Earth did orbit the sun,