Tag Archives: Time

Consequences of a Constant Speed of Light

Posted on January 26, 2016 by 2016spaceodyssey

I find it fascinating that what we see in the night sky is an image from the past.  Since nothing moves faster than the speed of light it is impossible to know what is going on at this exact moment on places other than the Earth and the Moon.  Hypothetically, the Sun could suddenly explode […] Continue reading →

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The Speed Limit of the Universe

Posted on January 25, 2016 by samihahplanet

58,536 km/h. That’s the speed of the fastest ever man-made vehicle: the New Horizons space probe. Though this may seem like an unfathomable feat to the layperson, there’s something that can travel even faster than that by five orders of magnitude. Light is the current “speed limit of the universe.” It travels at 3 x 108  m/s or 1 […] Continue reading →

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Common Misconception: The Earth’s Tilt At An Equinox

Posted on January 25, 2016 by andyastronomer

Upon visiting Dr. Grundstrom with a homework, I caught myself making a pretty silly error regarding the Earth’s Equinoxes. Looking at one of the homework questions for the seasons, I was asked to rank the order of several globes in order of how much daylight they received. One of the globes stood straight up, rotating […] Continue reading →

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The Cosmic Calendar

Posted on January 25, 2016 by Sofia

We, as humans, can have difficulty understanding amounts that exceed our narrow perspective. To aid us in understanding the 14 billion years that the universe has existed and the minuscule amount of time humans have inhabited it, scientists have put it in our terms of one year. Each month of the “cosmic calendar” represents roughly 1 … Continue reading “The Cosmic Calendar” Continue reading →

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The Great Shift

Posted on January 25, 2016 by alecsolarsystem

The Earth is like the top from Inception. As it spins around at very high speeds it wobbles or “precesses” back and forth as the force of gravity from the Moon and Sun tug it from different directions, but it will never fall over. This movement, although much slower and less noticeable than the Earth’s […] Continue reading →

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The Cosmic Calendar

Posted on January 20, 2016 by alecsolarsystem

The Cosmic Calendar is truly an eye-opening visualization of the entire age of our universe. It shrinks the entire 13.8 billion years that the universe has been around into one calendar year where each second equates to a few hundred years. The birth of the human species and just how little we have been around compared […] Continue reading →

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Bringing It All Together

Posted on April 30, 2015 by pMurs

Wow, it’s been a whole semester already. I’m about to be a senior and that is absolutely terrifying. I swear I was a freshman like two weeks ago. Of course, it’s all relative. If this time has been like a blink of an eye for me, it’s really some infinitesimally small fraction of the first […] Continue reading →

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Doctor Who is not COMPLETELY fictional

Posted on April 23, 2015 by karenagrebenc

Image from wikipedia.com This article covers arguably one of my favorite topics to swoon over-Doctor Who.  I will be completely honest in saying that my intense interest in studying the solar system and beyond came pretty much single-handedly from watching Doctor Who (and maybe a teensy bit by my mom making me watch old Star […] Continue reading →

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Hello future me, I am the past you from the present (4th dimension)!

Posted on April 7, 2015 by jshabazz93

Is time travel possible? Would humans be able to discern how to accomplish it even if it was possible? Upon reading the 1884 novel, Flatland, an interesting notion is introduced to the audience. You can only completely see objects one spatial dimension below you, and can only infer the dimension you spatially occupy through the […] Continue reading →

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Gravitational Redshift

Posted on February 14, 2015 by farhannshabab

Most of us know about redshifting, a phenomenon of the Doppler effect. This is the change in frequency of a wave, both mechanical and electromagnetic, for an observer when there is relative motion between the source and the observer. For example, when an observer is moving closer to a wave source, each successive wave front […] Continue reading →

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