That star at the center of our Solar System, that superhot ball of plasma that gives us heat and energy, and amazing complexions…well, it’s a ticking time bomb. Watch the full episode here:
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The two biggest planets in our Solar System in one telescope view. And catastrophe is imminent. If Jupiter and Saturn suddenly were on a collision course, which of the two planets would emerge victorious? How would the composition of these planets affect the outcome? And what impact would this have on the rest of our Solar System? What is a great conjunction?
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This gas cloud located 500 light years away from our solar system is about to become a planet.This process usually takes a few hundred million years, but what if we made it happen much quicker. And instead of it happening so far away, what if it happened right next to Earth? How would this new planet form? And what would it mean for life on our planet?
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From the craft itself, to what it is doing in space, to the new information is has discovered, join me as we explore how the Voyager 2 is back online and gathering data again!
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Space is huge, and because of that, we need help exploring it, even when it’s just exploring our solar system. It took us an incredible amount of time just to find and understand part of what makes our solar system special. From the 9 (not eight!) planets, to the moons of the planets, to the sun, and more. But to really venture into deep space and understand what’s out there, we needed not one, but two probes known as Voyager (enter Star Trek reference here).
Voyager 1 is a probe that humanity sent out to observe the universe at large, and it’s currently well past Pluto and has shown us many things about our solar system. In 2017, it was set at around 138 AU’s from our planet. AU means “Astronomical Unit”, which in this case means the distance from the Earth to the Sun. So 138 AU’s means that it’s 138 times far than the Earth is from the sun right now. That’s a really big number. Over 12 billion miles to be exact. That’s the farthest anything from man has traveled in space.
One of its crowning achievements was a photograph showing a set of sunbeams, and in one of those sunbeams was earth. It was a dot. A dot in a grander scale photograph of our solar system. That’s how small we are in the scale of our system when you look from the outside in, we are a dot. An epic dot, but a dot no doubt.
As for Voyager 2, despite it launching BEFORE Voyager 1 (by 16 days), it was set on a similar mission to explore the solar system. Albeit via a different route that took it past Neptune and Uranus. The point here is that these two probes are the farthest things that humanity has sent into the solar system. They have traveled incredible distances and are still revealing things about our solar system that continue to both boggle the mind and astound us.
Voyager 2 is now in Interstellar Space, a crowning achievement in and of itself. But that doesn’t mean it’s been all smooth sailing, far from it in certain ways In February 2020, it was noted by NASA that something had gone wrong with Voyager 2, and as such they had problems getting it to work properly. Given that the probe is in space that humanity hasn’t touched, and will likely not touch themselves for a long time, this is to be expected. However, a few days after that announcement, they revealed to the world that they had stabilized the problems on the craft and got it back up and working.
But what exactly caused the problems of the probe? Well, that would be a failed maneuver. Voyager 2 was supposed to do a rotation move that would shut off some of its instruments and thus conserve power. However, for whatever reason, the probe didn’t do it, and because of that, the scientific instruments that were on at the time…remained on…which made it so that the probe eventually shut down prematurely.
Not something you want to happen in the reaches of interstellar space when ANYTHING can happen in the blink of an eye.
This failure could’ve been catastrophic, because you see, to ensure that the probe would have a long life in space, it was given the bare essentials in many aspects, including its power supply. Believe it or not, despite being in space for over 42 years the Voyager 2 doesn’t have the biggest power supply, it actually uses radioactive fuel to produce heat, and thus power. But to conserve that power, it shuts off non-essential systems when it’s not using them.
So for the move to fail caused a serious drain in power, and likely sent NASA into quite a frenzy as they tried to make it work once again. Thankfully for them, on February 5th, 2020, they were able to connect with Voyager 2 once again, and confirm that it was up and running and able to continue its scientific mission in regards to examining and studying interstellar space.
“Voyager 2 has returned to normal operations following the anomaly on Jan. 25, 2020,” NASA officials wrote in a statement. “The five operating science instruments, which were turned off by the spacecraft’s fault protection routine, are back on and returning normal science data.”
To give you some context as to how dramatic that is in terms of time and space. At present, it takes a signal from NASA to the Voyager 2 (or vice versa) about 17 hours. Which means that Voyager 2 is indeed one of the farthest man-made object in space right now. It’s almost as far in space as Voyager 1. And that also means that if NASA asked Voyager 2 something, and it replied, it would take about a day and a half for NASA to get its answer. That makes it 122 times greater in distance from the Earth than the sun is. Or 122 AUs.
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We’ve thrown a lot of disasters at Earth over the years: from asteroids and aliens, to the Sun’s death. But hey, the Universe is a dangerous place, and we’re not done yet. Now we’re going to throw a black hole into the mix, and not just any black hole, but a blazar. Black holes are usually found at the center of the galaxy. The Milky Way has a black hole that is four million times the mass of the Sun. But that’s small compared to other black holes out there. How old is the oldest blazar? Why can we see some blazars, but not others? What is the Doppler effect and how would it let us know that a blazar is on its way? What are active galactic nuclei? Do radiation and gamma rays from blazars affect the Earth? How far is Markarian 421 from us?
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Jupiter is the largest planet in the Solar System. It’s 300 times more massive than Earth. But it’s less dense than our home. Uh-oh. Looks like somebody left the gas running on Jupiter. Don’t do anything stupid, like lighting a humongous match. What would a match need to be made of to ignite the gas giant? How big would it have to be? And how much damage would this explosion do to our Solar System? Would phosphorous be enough to cause an explosion on Jupiter?
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What is our place in the Milky Way? And our place in the Universe? In ancient times, many people had the idea our planet Earth to be at the centre of the Universe, as stated by Aristotle and Ptolomeus in their ptolemaic – aristotelic concept of universe: according to this model, Earth is at the center of the universe and all the other celestial bodies orbit around it. Today lots of people think the same. But is this really the case? To answer this question, let’s try to to a travel in the universe, through space and time; we will start our travel from our planet to reach, in the end, the extreme boundaries of the universe.
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During the 1600s, Galileo Galilei, the famous Italian astronomer, was one of the first people, during modern age, to have some doubts about the geocentric model of universe: thanks to telescopic observations, he was able to demonstrate our Earth is not at the rotation centre of planets and the Sun, but really it is the Sun itself. Moreover, observing planet Jupiter, he discovered that the giant planet is the rotation center for its moons. So, Galileo became aware that the center of the Solar System was the Sun, not the Earth!
The Solar System is made by a star, the Sun, eight planets and different types of minor celestial bodies, like comets, asteroids and dwarf planets.
Well, the Earth isn’t at the center of the Solar System, maybe is the closest planet to our Sun? No it isn’t, because it is only the third planet from the Sun: the closest planet to our star is Mercury, followed by Venus and then Earth. The Earth moves around the Sun, our star, just like all the other celestial bodies in the Solar System do: this implies that the Sun, and not our planet, is the center of rotation of the Solar System! The Earth takes a year, 365 days, to travel its orbit, and its average distance from the Sun is 150 million kilometers, which is the measure unit of distances in the Solar System known as the astronomical unit and abbreviated AU. Why do we talk about average distance? Because the orbit traveled by the Earth around the Sun is not circular but elliptical, and this means that there will be an aphelion (i.e. the point of the Earth’s orbit farthest from the Sun, just over 1 AU away from it) and a perihelion (the point of Earth’s orbit closest to the Sun, just under 1 AU). An alternative way to define the astronomical unit passes through the light time, in particular we can say that the average distance Earth – Sun is equal to about 8 light minutes: this means that sunlight takes 8 minutes to arrive on Earth, so that the sunlight we see at a certain moment is not that of that moment but it is the sunlight which left from the Sun 8 minutes earlier! In other words: if the sun went out for example at 2.30 pm, we would only notice it at 2.38 pm! Or again: if you could travel aboard the Star Wars Millennium Falcon it would take you only 8 minutes to travel from the Sun to the Earth (when in reality it takes a few years). To give a more concrete idea of the dimensions of the Solar System: if the Sun were a sphere with a diameter of 14 cm, Pluto would be at 700 m from the Sun, like seven regular soccer fields!
The nearest celestial body to Earth is the Moon, our satellite: to reach it you should take three days off! It’s the same time taken by Apollo astronauts to cover the distance of nearly 400 thousand kilometers that separate Moon and Earth. But if you had Star Trek Enterprise, and travel at maximum curvature, you would only take less than 2 seconds to reach the Moon!
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From the discovery of the moon, to what makes it so volcanic, and more! Join us as we explore Io: Jupiter’s Volcanic Moon!
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8. The Discovery Of Io
In many ways, Io is one of the more popular moons of Jupiter. It’s been referenced many a time as we’ll note later. But how did we learn about this very special moon?
The first reported observation of Io was made by Galileo Galilei on 7 January 1610 using a 20x-power, refracting telescope at the University of Padua. However, in that observation, Galileo could not separate Io and Europa due to the low power of his telescope, so the two were recorded as a single point of light. Io and Europa were seen for the first time as separate bodies during Galileo’s observations of the Jovian system the following day, January 8th, 1610 ( this is used as the discovery date for Io by the IAU).
The discovery of Io and the other Galilean satellites of Jupiter was published in Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius in March 1610. In his Mundus Jovialis, published in 1614, Simon Marius claimed to have discovered Io and the other moons of Jupiter in 1609, one week before Galileo’s discovery. Galileo doubted this claim and dismissed the work of Marius as plagiarism. Regardless, Marius’s first recorded observation came from 29 December 1609 in the Julian calendar, which equates to January 8th, 1610 in the Gregorian calendar, which Galileo used. Given that Galileo published his work before Marius, Galileo is credited with the discovery.
But the end of the “discovery” did not end there. Because for basically 250 years various astronomers tried to learn more about Io. But because of its place in space all they could usually see was a ball of light. It would take a while for them to start to parse out the details of the moon.
Improved telescope technology in the late 19th and 20th centuries allowed astronomers to resolve (that is, see as distinct objects) large-scale surface features on Io. In the 1890s, Edward E. Barnard was the first to observe variations in Io’s brightness between its equatorial and polar regions, correctly determining that this was due to differences in color and albedo between the two regions and not due to Io being egg-shaped, as proposed at the time by fellow astronomer William Pickering, or two separate objects, as initially proposed by Barnard. Later telescopic observations confirmed Io’s distinct reddish-brown polar regions and yellow-white equatorial band.
Telescopic observations in the mid-20th century began to hint at Io’s unusual nature. Spectroscopic observations suggested that Io’s surface was devoid of water ice (a substance found to be plentiful on the other Galilean satellites).
So as you can see, this wasn’t just a discovery of trying to find the moon, but to try and understand what it was and what it was like in regards to its very nature. Which would be further expanded upon in the future via attempts to explore the moon with probes and satellites.
7. The Exploration of Io Part 1
In the late 1960s, a concept known as the Planetary Grand Tour was developed in the United States by NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). It would allow a single spacecraft to travel past the asteroid belt and onto each of the outer planets, including Jupiter, if the mission was launched in 1976 or 1977. However, there was uncertainty over whether a spacecraft could survive passage through the asteroid belt, where micrometeoroids could cause it physical damage, or the intense Jovian magnetosphere, where charged particles could harm sensitive electronics.
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The Earth makes one full rotation on its axis every 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4.1 seconds. And it’s not moving at the same speed everywhere. The rotational speed varies depending on your distance to the poles. This rotation makes Earth suitable for life. The diurnal cycle, or the shifting between day and night, helps keep the planet at a habitable temperature. Earth’s rotation is the driving force of weather patterns. Even tides are affected by the Earth’s spin.
So if we were to accelerate this rotation, would we completely destabilize the climate? What would happen to the length of our day? What geographical and climate changes would occur? And at what point would life on Earth cease to exist?
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#WhatIf #Earth #SpeedOfLight #Rotation #WeatherPatterns
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