Black holes have always been one of the most fascinating things about our universe. I’m sure everyone remembers how the internet went insane when this photo was released. Black holes are everywhere in popular media like movies and video games. The concept that something so massive exists and nothing can ever escape from it astonishes and intrigues many, including me. The most notable example of black holes in media to me is the movie Interstellar in which they go into a black hole and suddenly have the ability to reach the fourth dimension and they can time travel and its crazy. Anyway, the fun part about that is that is that no one knows what goes on once an object goes into the singularity, or middle, of the black hole. The line that once crossed means it can never come back is called the event horizon. Since nothing can escape, even light, this is why black holes appear black, and that is how they got their names. However, I like to think of black holes as the only things in the universe that we know of that are completely invisible. Since no light can escape then there is no light for your eyes to see. We do of course see the light surrounding black holes, which kind of ruins my whole “invisible” head cannon, but I still like to think of them that way.
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Paradoxes are always interesting to contemplate, and the Fermi paradox is no different. First proposed by Enrico Fermi (above) the Fermi paradox in a nutshell is if the scale and probability of our universe favors intelligent life developing elsewhere, then why have we not found any evidence of that life. This paradox sparked Frank Drake to create the Drake equation we looked at in class. Many scientists have contemplated this paradox for years, but no real solution has come about, and one likely never will in our lifetimes. However, the theory I most subscribe to is the Great Filter. The Great Filter is whatever natural phenomena that would cause the evolution of intelligent life so rare. Having taken biology and seeing all the processes and events that led up to our evolution it’s a surprise that we are even here to begin with. I am open to hearing other’s thoughts on the matter.
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Like many of you I was very excited to see the solar eclipse today. I thought about driving to see totality, but ended up choosing against it as I figured it would be too much, and I had a quiz the morning of. So, I decided to stick around campus and watch it from here. Aaaaaaaaaaand it was underwhelming. It was just way too cloudy to see it consistently. We only got brief glimpses at it. I was able to snap this photo just before it went back behind the clouds. I’m hoping others who went to the area of totality got to see it better. I remember the one in 2017, I was also very close to totality then. It was a really cool experience since there were no clouds in the sky. The coolest thing I remember was that all the leaves made crescent shaped shadows on the ground which made a really cool effect.
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The Kuiper Belt was foreign to me before this class. I had never heard of it and because of that it stuck out to me. The basics of the Kuiper Belt is that it is the large region beyond Neptune. It stretches from about 30au-50au from the Sun. So far NASA says that only 2000 objects have been categorized. Which is astonishingly small for how big it is, but they estimate that there are hundreds of thousands of objects in it. Another interesting fact about the Kuiper Belt is that many of its objects have moons. This of course includes Pluto but other objects in it also have moons. The Kuiper Belt remains one of the most interesting but understudied parts of our solar system. I encourage everyone to look it up at some point and see if it interests you as well.
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Aboard Voyager 1 and 2 there sits a golden record. This golden record contains anything NASA thinks is important to understanding humanity. The record contains both photos and images. The golden record fascinates me so much because of what they chose to put on it. First, they needed a way to communicate how to play the record. The did this with the part in the top left of the face of the record. The top right shows how the pictures are supposed to be created. Pictures include basic math, biology, and information about our solar system. Beyond the science stuff there are also photos of what life on Earth is like. Photos of cars, planes, sports and more. I encourage everyone to look it up and see the photos for yourself. There are also sounds including music but also everyday sounds like rain and dogs.
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Ever wonder how we know how old dinosaurs were? Or how long humans have been on the Earth? Well, it all comes down to a technique that scientists use called carbon dating. The process starts with the Sun’s radiation colliding with a N-14 causing a proton to fall off and creating C-14. This C-14 reacts with oxygen in the atmosphere to create CO2, which then follows the food chain. The interesting part is that when an animal dies, it stops consuming C-14. C-14 is an unstable isotope meaning that it will eventually go through radioactive beta decay to become N-14 with a half-life of 5,730 years.
This means that by looking at the ratio of the amount of C-14 to C-12 left in the remains of organic life, you can tell roughly how old long ago that specimen lived. C-12 is notably stable meaning its concentration will remain and will not decay any further. Carbon dating does have a limit as beyond a certain half-life the concentration of C-14 becomes too small. However, if you want to date much older things the same principle of carbon dating applies to other radioactive isotopes with much longer half-lives.
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One thing that has always fascinated me is how gravity and time are interlocked. Specifically, people at higher altitudes experience time relatively faster than people at sea level. This is due to a concept called gravitational time dilation. Time dilation comes from Newton’s theory of relativity. Basically, the more gravity you feel, the slower you experience time relative to someone who is experiencing less gravity.
The photo above helps put it into perspective. It shows how people on the International Space Station (ISS) loose roughly 24 microseconds a day due to this effect. Now in the grand scheme of things 24 microseconds a day is nothing relative to a human life, but the whole principle has some funny applications. For instance, if you take a plane flight you are actively speeding up your life.
I remember when I was first made aware of the concept of time dilation. I was watching some documentary or listening to a podcast, I cannot remember specifically, and the person was saying, if you were being sucked into a black hole, and look out towards the rest of the universe, you would be able to see it rapidly aging due to the high gravity you are experiencing. He continued the thought experiment saying, assuming that you are invincible, as you reach the center you would be able to see the heat death of the universe.
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Galileo Galilei (2/15/1564-1/8/1642) began his important contributions to astronomy with his further development of the telescope. According to Wikipedia, he has many important contributions. One of his notable contributions is the progress he made in observing the moon. He focused on the moon’s craters, valleys, and mountains. He discovered Jupiter’s four largest moons through observing them and taking notes on how sometimes they disappear behind Jupiter. He observed and documented the phases of Venus. He observed sunspots. He was also an advocate for the heliocentric theory as opposed to the geocentric view.
Galileo lived during several historical events. In September 1620, the Mayflower set sail from England on its way to America. And in 1636, Harvard University was founded. Harvard is the oldest University in America. William Shakespeare (born 4/23/1564 died 4/23/1616) was an important historical figure that lived at the same time as Galileo. I’m sure everyone knows who Shakespeare is, he wrote many great pieces of literature throughout his life and his influence is still felt today.
What really interested me in doing this is how much these historical events overlapped. I always assumed that there was a gap between the events, but it comes to find out they are all very close to each other. It seems crazy that Galileo and Shakespeare were born in the same year, 1564, and that Harvard was founded 16 years after the Mayflower set sail. I think my presupposition that they didn’t overlap comes from the fact that American history and European history were taught in two separate classes in high school.
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It is difficult to truly grasp the size and scale of our universe. And while using units like light years might be helpful in some cases, it can also be helpful to put things in a scale that is more common in everyday life. This image helps me understand the scale of the universe in terms of units in meters. The smallest unit femtometers (fm) is equal to 10^-15m. Each subsequent photo is 1000x bigger than the last ending with Ym which is 10^24m. It is interesting to see that in terms of scale, the smallest picture, which is the nucleus of an oxygen atom, is to us, as we are to an Oort cloud. In other words, there is a 10^15x difference between an oxygen nucleus and us, and a 10^15x difference between us and an Oort cloud. Even with this aid, I still struggle to grasp the sheer size of it all. I am interested in what others think about this, and what ways you try to put everything into perspective to understand it.
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