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Andrew Watson: The 'most influential' black footballer for decades lost to history

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  By Andrew Aloia BBC Sport Last updated on 11 October 2021 11 October 2021 . From the section Football Watson was a trailblazer who helped transform how football was played There are two murals of black footballers facing one another across an alleyway in Glasgow. One helped shape football as we know it, the other is Pele. Andrew Watson captained Scotland to a 6-1 win over England on his debut in 1881. He was a pioneer, the world's first black international, but for more than a century the significance of his achievements went unrecognised. Research conducted over the past three decades has left us with some biographical details: a man descended of slaves and of those who enslaved them, born in Guyana, raised to become an English gentleman and famed as one of Scottish football's first icons. And yet today, 100 years on from his death aged 64, Watson remains something of an enigma, the picture built around him a fractured one. His grainy, faded, sepia image evokes many differen...
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UNIVERSE TODAY Space and astronomy news

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POSTED ON BY NANCY ATKINSON

Fantastic Visualization Shows What Would Happen if you Dropped a Ball Across the Solar System

Summertime means it’s time to play ball! But what would it be like to play ball on various locations across our Solar System? Planetary scientist Dr. James O’Donoghue has put together a fun animation of how quickly an object falls on to the surfaces of places like the Sun, Earth, Ceres, Jupiter, the Moon, and Pluto.

The animation shows a ball dropping from 1 kilometer to the surface of each object, assuming no air resistance. You can compare, for example, that it takes 2.7 seconds for a ball to drop that distance on the Sun, while it takes 14.3 seconds Earth.  

“This should give an idea for the pull you would feel on each object,” O’Donoghue said.

But what about the pull of gravity on the big planets vs. Earth? Interestingly enough, it takes and 13.8 seconds for the ball to drop on Saturn, and 15 seconds on Uranus.

“It might be surprising to see large planets have a pull comparable to smaller ones at the surface,” O’Donoghue said on Twitter. “For example Uranus pulls the ball down slower than at Earth! Why? Because the low average density of Uranus puts the surface far away from the majority of the mass. Similarly, Mars is nearly twice the mass of Mercury, but you can see the surface gravity is actually the same… this indicates that Mercury is much denser than Mars.”

Ceres comes in at the pokiest place to play ball, with a ball dropping 1km in 84.3 seconds.

O’Donoghue, along with input from astronomer Rami Mandow, used a NASA planetary fact sheet for reference to create the video.

O’Donoghue also referenced one of the most famous gravity experiments ever conducted, the one by astronaut Dave Scott on the Moon:

O’Donoghue has a number of great videos on his YouTube channel, including a visualization of the velocities required to escape the pull of gravity from various bodies in the Solar System.

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