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Tag Archives: gravity
blog 2: Gravity over time
Isaac Newton originally conceptualized gravity as a mutually attractive force between all objects with mass. Those who came before him, such as Galileo, had performed experiments and attempted to establish increasingly robust understandings of this force, but none quite unified the idea like Newton. The story goes that Newton saw an apple fall from a […] Continue reading
Posted in Class, Historical, Physics
Tagged astro2110, astronomy, blog2, Einstein, gravity, Newton, relativity
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Blog Post 6: Gravitational Slingshot
Have you ever played with a slingshot to shoot small items such as pebbles as a kid? Astronomers can also tap into their inner child by using a gravitational slingshot in space. A gravitational slingshot happens when a small object uses the gravitational pull of a larger object to speed itself up. Take a spacecraft […] Continue reading
The Unimaginable Nature of Space-Time
Most depictions of the space-time continuum display it as a two-dimensional plane in three-dimensional space. In such a model, objects make indents in the plane based on their gravity, with more massive objects having larger indents. This model is helpful to display how gravity works, but it doesn’t capture the whole picture. The planar model […] Continue reading
Powered and Unpowered Gravity Assists
The farthest planets in the solar system are so distant, it is infeasible to reach them using only rockets. The delta-v, or change in velocity, required to propel a spacecraft to a gas giant like Saturn is far too impractical for today’s rockets to achieve. The main problem is that a spacecraft needs tons of […] Continue reading
Gravitational Lensing!
In class, we’ve been diving into the world of gravity and light. We have covered Newton’s laws of motion and the effects of gravity in our universe. As well, we’ve explored how light behaves and travels through space. Now I want to introduce another intriguing topic that combines the two –gravitational lensing! Gravitational lensing occurs […] Continue reading
Detecting Extrasolar Planets
Extrasolar planets can be difficult to detect because they are tiny, far away, and dim, but the Doppler Method provides an indirect way to find them. This method involves looking for alternating blueshifts and redshifts in the star’s spectrum, which reveal a star’s motion around its center of mass. This motion could reveal the presence […] Continue reading
Posted in Class
Tagged astro2110, blog6, Class, discovery, dopplershift, extrasolar, gravity, planets
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The Speed of Gravity
If the Sun were to disappear, how long would it take for us to notice? This question usually brings about an answer of ‘8 minutes’, or about the time that it takes light from the Sun to reach Earth. However, Earth is orbiting the Sun, and if it were to instantaneously disappear, would Earth still […] Continue reading
Blog#2 Gravity
Ancient Greek philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle deduced that moving heaven bodies makes circular motion because a circle is the perfect heaven path. Later scientists such as Tycho claimed that heavenly bodies are pushed by angels. Nobody previous to Isaac Newton was aware of the concept “Gravity.” Perhaps the most famous legend about gravity […] Continue reading
The History of Gravity
Gravity has been a mystery for most of human history, and it was only recently(about 350 years ago) that the first gravitational theory was published. Gravity was always thought of as a force that brought things to their “natural place.” But when Copernicus came up with his idea for a heliocentric solar system, a theory […] Continue reading
What makes the Tides happen?
This blog will be referencing information sourced from the Tides: Crash Course Astronomy #8 video. We know that mass has gravity, and more mass had more gravity. This raises the question, why does the moon have a greater impact on the Earth’s tides than the Sun, even though the Sun has such a greater gravitational …