Daily Knowledge

"Wherever there is a human being, there is an opportunity for a kindness."
[Lucius Annaeus Seneca]

Quote of the Day, from brainyquote.com (2026/01/27)

Market square of Dęblin during the German occupation

Thousands of Jews lived in the towns of Dęblin and Irena in central Poland before World War II. In September 1939, the town was captured in the German invasion of Poland and the persecution of Jews began with drafts into forced labor and the start of a Judenrat. An open ghetto was made in Irena and its inhabitants worked on labor projects for Dęblin Fortress, the railway, and the Luftwaffe. Beginning in May 1941, Jews were sent to labor camps around Dęblin from the Opole and Warsaw ghettos. Conditions in the ghetto worsened due to epidemics of typhus and dysentery. The first deportation was on 6 May 1942 and took around 2,500 Jews to the Sobibór extermination camp. A week later, two thousand Jews arrived from Slovakia and hundreds more from nearby ghettos. In October, the Irena ghetto was liquidated; about 2,500 Jews were deported to the Treblinka extermination camp while some 1,400 Jews were retained as inmates of forced-labor camps. On 27 July 1944, the camp was liberated by the Red Army. (Full article...)

Star chart of Ursa Minor

1343 – Clement VI issued the papal bull Unigenitus, justifying the power of the pope and the use of indulgences.
1726 – J. S. Bach led the first performance of Alles nur nach Gottes Willen, BWV 72, concluding his third Christmas season in Leipzig on the Third Sunday after Epiphany.
1785 – The University of Georgia, the oldest state-chartered public university in the United States, was founded.
1996 – Mahamane Ousmane, the first democratically elected president of Niger, was deposed by Colonel Ibrahim Baré Maïnassara in a military coup d'état.
2011 – Astronomers documented H1504+65, a white dwarf in Ursa Minor (chart pictured) with the hottest surface temperature known at the time, at 200,000 kelvins (360,000 °F).

Age of Earth: ~ 4.568 billion years
World Population: 7.3 billion (July 2015)
Continents: 7 (Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Antarctica, Europe, and Australia)
Mean Radius: 6371.0 km
Axial Tilt: 23,44°

Image Source: Wikipedia - License: Public Domain (thanks to NASA)

Our solar system consists of
1 star (Sun) and 8 planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune).

1 AU (astronomical unit) is roughly the distance between Earth and the Sun (about 150 million kilometres).
The space probe Voyager 1 was launched by the NASA in 1977 and is meanwhile (autumn 2015) about 133 AU away from Earth.

Image Source: Wikipedia - License: CC BY-SA 3.0