The word of the day: Albedo.

When you look up information about planets, one of the bits of data given is the albedo of the planet. Albedo is one of the vocabulary words that introductory astronomy students have to learn. According to the textbook that we are using, Mars has an albedo of 0.15, Jupiter has an albedo of 0.44, and Venus has an albedo of 0.59. So, what is albedo? What do these numbers mean?

Put very simply, albedo is a measure of the reflectivity of a body. You compute the...