Toy gyroscopes can do all kinds of interesting tricks. The most mysterious one, precession, seems to defy gravity. By definition, precession refers to a change in the orientation of the rotational ...

The wobble of Earth’s axis is called precession. While most of us are familiar with our planet’s primary motions — rotation and revolution — few are aware of precession. This characteristic is vividly ...

This illustration shows how Earth’s spin axis (blue) is tilted from perpendicular, causing it to precess and trace out a circle over about 26,000 years. The brightest star nearest the North Celestial ...

Regular readers of my column certainly know how to use the Big Dipper to find the North Star (aka Polaris). Some folks believe Polaris is important because it’s the brightest star in the heavens, and ...

An investigation carried out by the astrophysicists questions one of the most interesting findings about the dynamics of the Milky Way in recent years: that the precession, or the wobble in the axis ...

As Earth moves through space, it wobbles slightly. A team of researchers from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and the University of Bonn has now succeeded in measuring these fluctuations in ...