If Light Travelled Really Fast…

Posted on January 27, 2013 by ibrahim2016

According to prevailing theories in Physics, the speed of light, denoted by ‘c’ is a universal constant. It means that it is intrinsically related to the very nature of the universe. We exist because we are the culmination of almost fourteen billion years of conformation to this value by every single one of the atoms in the universe. So what I am about to write is pure conjecture. The consequences of the minutest change in ‘c’ will lead to fundamental reformation of the universe and even a Dumbledore/Voldemort/Gandalf/Chuck Norris mutant wouldn’t be able to prevent you from not existing.

Having placated any fundamentalists out there,let us imagine then that the speed of light increases exponentially one fine morning but the change strangely refuses to harm the wise homos on planet earth. Let us also exercise tradition and ignore the fact that the universe is literally falling apart. Now then,

1. David Blaine would become homeless

If you don’t know who he is, I salute your choice of TV content. But for the sake of this article, let me explain: he is a illusionist who sometimes does levitation tricks. Why would he go out of a job? Because everyone could levitate if light was really fast. You would still not hold a candle to Superman but you would be able to fly in a very crude sense. That’s because the speed of light is directly related to the electromagnetic force. It is the force that repels the atoms of the earth and your body from merging together. So if the speed of light increased, that force of repulsion would increase and stuff would literally start to levitate.

2. You would become really hot and World Peace will be in jeopardy

That’s it, that’s it. Don’t get your hopes up. I meant literally. And the ‘and’ was not intended to indicate causality. It was more in the flavor of: a goat and a microwave. Anyways,  a greater electromagnetic force would mean that chemical/nuclear reactions would become more ‘vibrant’. The reactions that require lots of energy to start would need even more energy. But the ones that release energy, well lets just say if someone decides to pull another Hiroshima it would vaporize the earth’s atmosphere. Back to hotness, so the human body also burns up chemicals for energy. And that burning up is exothermic. And it would be so vigorous that you would feel as if you are on fire. The up side is that you wouldn’t ever feel cold again.

3. Dragon Ball fans will have a field day and Master Chief will lose his edge

shockwave_punch_small

Okay, just ignore everything but the fist.

With your body’s chemical burning being so over-productive, your muscles will become really powerful. You will be able to run faster, jump higher and strike with lightning speed. And the increased repulsive forces between you hands and the air molecules will allow you to create a shock-wave of awesomeness with every punch in the air.

4. Star trek will reboot as a reality show

The enthusiasm of exothermic reactions will also apply to fuel. Cars (or perhaps levitation pods) will become very fuel efficient. So will rockets, thus reducing cost of space travel. You could actually go to mars on the same fuel that you now use to go to your grandma (who incidentally might be moonlighting as a ninja, given the circumstances). Whats even better is that you could reach and even exceed the old speed of light using conventional means. So interstellar travel will become a very possible possibility.

5. But in reality…

Stars wouldn’t exist. Nuclear fusion, the process that runs stars, happens when two atoms over come their repulsion and fuse to release energy. But then the repulsion will be so high that atoms wouldn’t even want to come close to one another. Since there will be no stars, there will be no supernovas that release heavier elements (including carbon) into the universe. Had the speed of light been faster since the big bang, we would not even have existed. There would be no black holes since the speed of light will be too large to be captured by the gravity-well of any body. So any dreams we might have of making a shortcut through space time to achieve time travel or actual FTL communications will be quashed.

I’ll end with an awesome limerick:

There was an old lady called Wright
who could travel much faster than light.
She departed one day
in a relative way
and returned on the previous night.

3025-if-you-know-what-i-mean

 


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The Size of the Universe

Posted on January 27, 2013 by marknshirleyvu
Image

Wikipedia

I will always be amazed by the size of the Universe as we know it.  The above photo (along with a little bit of zooming) is a perfect illustration of the unbelievable vastness of our “observable universe.”  Our observable universe consists of all objects whose light has reached us on Earth, and is roughly 14 billion light years in diameter.  It blows me away that there are still parts of the Universe out there we haven’t observed because their light has not had the time to reach us yet.  With technology constantly advancing and the light from distant parts of the Universe constantly travelling towards us, imagine what kinds of things human kind will be able to observe in the next one thousand or one hundred thousand years!  I’ve attached a link to a very interesting graphic that really puts into perspective the size of everything in our Universe, I encourage you to check it out!

Graphic:  The Scale of the Universe


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Ophiucus: The Thirteenth Zodiac?

Posted on January 27, 2013 by jacob933
Ophiuchus

Ophiuchus (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Two years ago, an astronomer from Minnesota named Parke Kunkle informed the American public that not only  had the date ranges for each of the zodiac signs changed, but that a 13th Zodiac sign had been added called Ophiuchus. This became big news very quickly and elicited very heated responses from many astrologers. One astrologer called his claims “ridiculous” and said that “we’ve known about this for ages.” The debate boils down to Eastern vs. Western astrology. Eastern astrology uses the sidereal zodiac (based on constellations), which has added the 13th sign, Ophiuchus, to the original 12 found in the night sky almost 3,000 years ago. Western astrology uses the tropical zodiac (based on seasons), which has not changed over time.

For the new dates, click here.

For more information on mythology of Ophiuchus, click here.


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Precession and the Poles

Posted on January 27, 2013 by mirandaskunz

Pretty much everyone in the North Hemisphere knows about the North Star and how it can be used in navigation. The North Star is such a familiar subject to me that I was surprised when I learned that the North pole does not always point toward the North Star. As we have learned in astro 201, this is due to the precession of the Earth. The Earth “wobbles” on its axis, so the North and South poles point to different places in space depending on the time period.

NPolars

The map above shows the path that the North pole traces out in the sky due to precession. From the map, it is clear that as few as a thousand years ago, the North pole very obviously did not point toward the North star. This fact blows my mind. I have read literature from more than a thousand years ago, so it’s crazy to me to think that, when the authors of this literature looked to the sky, the North pole faced a totally different point in space. This also got me thinking about how, although there is no “South Star” now, there must be one at some periods in time. The below image shows the path that the South pole traces out due to precession.

SPolars

Sure enough, there are plenty of bright stars that lie very close to this path and could therefore be considered “South stars.” By comparing these two maps (note that the Northern path proceeds counterclockwise and the Southern path proceeds clockwise), a couple thousand years ago, there was no clear North star, but there was a South star belonging to the constellation of Hydrus.

To me, the fact that something as seemingly constant and unchanging as the North Star is in reality a transient phenomenon just goes to show that out universe is truly mysterious and awe-inspiring.

The original sources of the star maps can be found here.


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Our Vast Universe

Posted on January 27, 2013 by CJ Jeon

When reading up the size of our earth, our solar system, and ultimately, our universe, my mind was completely blown. The following video shows just how small our earth really is, compared to other planets in our solar system, our sun, and other stars in the constellations that we can see at night. Just to go on a little more about the relative size of our earth, we are about 92 million miles from the sun, and we could fit about 1.3 million earths in the sun, yet it looks so small when looking at it in the sky. That same sun is the star that our planet, only 1/1300000 of the size of the sun, is orbiting around. I just find that the relative size of the sun, when looking at it from earth, and how truly big it really is, is just dumbfounding. Then to go on with our universe, I mean, it’s just never ending. And to think that there are so many more suns, so many more planets and stars, really puts me in perspective at how small, how miniscule, us humans and even our earth are in our galaxy. We learn in other science classes that the sizes of atoms and molecules are even smaller than the what the human eye can see, and that itself is pretty fascinating. However, relating that to how small the earth is to the vast and never-ending universe is I think even more shocking.

You can find the site to the video here. 


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Google Sky Map

Posted on January 27, 2013 by AlanL

Once I first learned about the Google Sky Map app I was amazed at how it worked and its capabilities. It uses the date and time and the phone’s GPS and compass to determine where you are and where you’re looking to create a star chart that you can interact with. If there is something interesting in the sky you could use it to determine whether it is a planet, a bright star or maybe just an airplane. On the other hand, if you want to find where a certain constellation is you could use the search function and it will direct you in the proper direction to locate it.

Looking for Mercury Using Google Sky Map (Source: androidapps4u)

Lastly, you can change the date and time to whenever you want or even one of the popular dates preloaded on the app such as the Apollo 11 moon landing. Unfortunately I haven’t used this app to its full potential yet, but I expect to look at the sky more often after having taken ASTR 201 and refer Google Sky Map for guidance.


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Precession: The Great Year

Posted on January 27, 2013 by burnspress

Precession: The Great Year

As humans on Earth there are two celestial motions that affect us most obviously. Earths diurnal motion, its rotation on its axis responsible for day and night, and Earth’s revolution around the sun, determining our yearly cycles (winter, spring, blooming, hibernation, migration). A third and less obvious celestial motion is precession. Its time scale hides the immediate impact of precession, as the human being has a life span of one-360th of a roughly 24,000-year precession cycle.

In the book Hamlet’s Mill, Giorgio de Santilla, former professor of the history of science at MIT, and coauthor Dr. Hertha von Dechend, explain how ancient cultures viewed consciousness and history as a cyclical cycle. In contrast to our linear model of time, these cultures believed in a vast cycle of time that consists of the rising and falling of ages, and moves with the precession of the equinox. Santilla and Dechend show that more than thirty ancient cultures believed in this cycle that Plato called The Great Year.

In the hyperlink above, you can read about the thinking behind these precessional cycles and how a moving Solar System might provide a logical reason for The Great Year and alternating ages.


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Precession

Posted on January 27, 2013 by williamcpower

For my second blog I would like to discuss the precession of the Earth’s axis and how it could relate to possible climate change. We learned in class that seasons are caused because of the tilt of the earth. The till causes light to be more direct on a hemisphere during particular parts of the year. This is what causes the seasons to change. The greater the tilt, the more extreme the seasons are. I decided to explore if this could possible explain climate change one earth.

I found this interesting picture that shows that the north and south pole receive the minimum radiation from the sun when there is an axis tilt of 0 degrees and a maximum amount of radiation from the sun when the tilt is at 60 degrees.

Image

(here is were I found it)

What I thought was very interesting was that the earth’s tilt fluctuates from 22.1 to 24.5 degrees. We are currently at a tilt of 23.5 degrees. This is 0.4 degrees closer to the maximum tilt than the minimum tilt, so it would make sense that now the Earth has a warmer climate than, for example, the ice ages.

To get a second opinion about this I found a web site and an article. They both describe how the changing tilt (precession) of the Earth’s axis is directly related to climate change. Many people still debate how much of an effect this has on our current climate change and regardless of who is right, it is a pretty interesting concept.


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The Size of the Universe

Posted on January 27, 2013 by mirandaskunz

This video is similar to the Powers of Ten video, but it zooms in and out of the universe at a much faster pace, so it was easier for me to understand. The video starts with a view of a region on Earth and then slowly zooms out to the solar system, galaxy, and finally, the observable universe. Then, it zooms back in at a faster speed, going all the way to the atomic level. I like this representation because it uses a series of concentric circles to help the viewer keep track of the last image shown. This technique also helped me comprehend the scale of each image compared to the last image.

In classes like chemistry and biology, we talk a lot about how electrons are so small that it is impossible for us to comprehend their size. This video, however, reveals that the exponential size difference between an electron and something we can see, like a drop of water on a leaf, is relatively small compared to the even larger size difference between a drop of water and the universe. Although an electron is too small to comprehend, the universe is way more too large to comprehend. Before watching this video, I had never thought of the immensity of the universe in comparison to the microscopic size of an electron, but it is an very interesting idea.

The original video can be found here.


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Power of the Zodiac

Posted on January 27, 2013 by michaelglindsay

Many of the belief system of ancient civilizations are based on what these rather primitive people observed around them, i.e. the Aztecan Sun god, the Greek gods of the sun, ocean, thunder, etc. To those ancient people who first realized the pattern of procession that the sun exhibits in it astral travels, it must as seemed as if the Universe had dropped the answer key to all of life’s mysteries. When the first concept of seasons emerged, the first few who, based on the position of the sun and stars, could predict when storms were likely must have felt such a mastery over the world around them. Is it any wonder why the Zodiac gained a sort of cult developed to its proposed mysticism? Breaking free from these beliefs in favor of the scientific method must have been and arduous process for early astronomers and meteorologists, a struggle which I believe does not get enough appreciation.  Even now, the sun keeps to its schedule, predictable for centuries to come. In fact, in the future millennium we made fade away due to illness, politics, or natural disaster, but the sun’s voyage through the zodiac in Earth’s sky, the Earth’s orbital path around the sun, will remain as steadfast as ever.

Image

http://www.astrologycom.com

http://www.astrologycom.com/zodiac.html


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