Exploring Space and Time With Your Computer
Exploring Space and Time With Your Computer
Before the advent of personal computers and the Internet, before … I used to own several telescopes. I spent hours in the cold winter nights to take photos through the scopes that I would later develop into my photo lab. But together, all these hours were not as good a picture as you can download from the Internet in just a few seconds. These images from the Hubble telescope.
The Hubble Heritage Project is dedicated to information about the Hubble telescope. There are some really great images of our universe here. Many people do not realize what is really at the night sky. Because the telescope and several other specialized telescopes, we are just beginning to understand the universe around us.
The telescope is a time machine. Not in ‘Dr Who’ feeling, but it really is not looking back in time. If you look at the night sky, a number of stars you do not even exist. But you continue to see. How is this possible? Because you are looking for them as they once were, not as they are today. They are so distant that their light can take millions of years to reach us. The nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is about 4.3 light years. It is nearly 26 trillion miles.
The light from this star is 4.3 years to reach us. And it is the nearest star. The Hubble telescope has found objects whose light has taken 13 billion years to reach us!
It is difficult to believe at this time. Light travels approximately 186.000 miles per second. The sound is a little easier to understand. Sound travels about 750 miles per hour. Ever wondered how far away lightning is it? As the time interval between the flash and noise all game, second sound travel about 1 / 5 of a mile. So if you Donder 7 seconds after the flash to hear, the strike was about 1.4 miles away.
The loudest noise ever recorded was Krakatau (volcanic island) dynamited in 1883. The explosion was heard on the island of Rodrigues 3000 miles away. It took four hours for her to get there.
The distance to the stars is so great that the light we see today may become extinct millions of years. Yet we always see. The composition of light that astronomers can tell what a star is created. All components have unique signatures. The shift in the frequency of these signatures tell us where the star moves toward us or away. This is the Doppler effect. If an object moves toward you, the frequency of its light is shifted higher. If it retreats, it is shifted lower.
This effect can be observed on earth. Listen to the engine because it is a race car or a train whistle approaches. The pitch (frequency) of sound will increase as it approaches, then reduce, if you go. Move faster, change pitch.
