By Chris Carpenter
Our recent Venus Transit on June 5th was a once-ina-lifetime event. Venus transits (eclipses) the Sun about every 110 years in 8-year pairs. The last pair occurred before 1900; the next won’t happen until after 2100. The sun contains 99% of the mass in the solar system, yet only about 1% of the angular momentum. The sun will live for another 4.5 billion years, give or take. If you added up the mass of all the comets in the entire solar system, they would approximately equal the mass of the Earth. If the Earth’s orbit was 1% closer or farther away from the Sun, we would boil or freeze to death.