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Tag Archives: blog1
Blog 1:What Causes Seasons?
It is commonly believed that the Earth’s distance from the Sun determines the seasons. The Earth’s orbit is lopsided and we are closer to the sun at different times in the year. In the northern hemisphere, we are closest to the sun when we have winter debunking the misconception that the distance to the sun […] Continue reading
Total Solar Eclipse
On August 21st, 2017, the citizens of Oregon to South Carolina got to see a total Solar Eclipse. Although there is a total solar eclipse approximately every 18 months visible somewhere on Earth, the odds of the eclipse’s path passing over head where you can see it is much lower. Many mathematicians and scientist have […] Continue reading
Blog#1 Cosmic Calendar
I found the idea “Cosmic Calendar” particularly intriguing. Cosmic Calendar is a method to visualize the universe’s chronolUniverseling its currently understood age of 13.8 billion years to a single year (Therese). At this scale, there are 437.5 years per cosmic second, 1.575 million years per cosmic hour, and 37.8 million years per cosmic day (Therese). At this scale, on […] Continue reading
Precession Visualized
After reading the initial chapters of our textbook, I was captivated by the fact that the way Earth’s tilt changes can be dumbed down to the movement of a spinning top. It’s always fascinating seeing physics work on any scale, so I was eager to look into the subject. After a bit of searching, I […] Continue reading
Posted in Class, Physics
Tagged angularmomentum, astro2110, blog1, precession
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Powers of Ten and the scale of the Universe
After reaching a scale of 10^24 meters, the camera zooms back in all the way to a single proton, which is visible and in frame at a scale of 10^-16 meters. 10^+16 meters is roughly 10 light years. With these two numbers, it also frames humans as obviously very large in comparison to a proton, …
Continue reading Powers of Ten and the scale of the Universe
Solstices and Equinoxes
The seasons change as Earth orbits the sun. Earth’s hemispheres receive different amounts of sunlight during each season because of the 23.5 degree tilt of Earth’s axis. When the Earth is at a point in its orbit that the northern hemisphere is tilted toward the sun, it is summer for the northern hemisphere. This is […] Continue reading
Can We Travel Faster Than the Speed of Light (like in Star Wars)?
One interesting question that has crossed many minds is, “Can humans travel at the speed of light?” Movies like Star Wars and Star Trek seem to believe that we can travel at, or even exceed, the speed of light (300,000,000 m/s) as they depict spaceships capable of jumping into hyperspace. In order to assess this […] Continue reading
Posted in Class
Tagged astro2110, blog1, hyperspeed, speed of light
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The Speed of Light (or so we think)
To measure the speed of anything, the simplest thing to do is to measure how long it takes to travel a known distance. By dividing the distance over the time, we obtain the speed: Speed = Distance / Time However, measuring the speed of light is not so easy. Colloquially known as about 3 x […] Continue reading
Posted in Class
Tagged astro2110, blog1, speed of light
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How Big is the Universe?
The universe is so big that we can’t even begin to comprehend its true size. First, we can look close to home and realize how big even our own Solar System is. The moon is the furthest place humans have voyaged, sitting at about 200,000 miles away. The next planet over(Mars), however, can be up […] Continue reading
blog post 01
Solstices and Equinoxes The winter/summer solstices are, respectively, the shortest and longest periods of sunlight during the calendar year. The vernal/autumnal equinoxes are days in which the amount of time the day has with sunlight and without are of equal length. Days that are solstices/equinoxes demonstrate the formal change in seasons. This occurs because the […] Continue reading