Month: February 2015

The Continual Search for Planets

Posted on by conorastr201

The discovery of planets throughout the ages

The discovery of planets throughout the ages

The discovery of new life-harboring planets has been a hot topic in the last century, but there has always been a limitation: we couldn’t see other planets. However, observational technologies and techniques have progressed to the point where we may be able to find more Earth-like planets within a few short years.

The main problems with discovering so called exo-planets is that they are not luminous, they don’t shine. Because of this, we need to indirectly detect them by observing the stars around which they orbit. As the planets orbit their respective stars, they briefly block some of the light from reaching us; however, that only works when the systems are exactly in-line with ours, which rules out the vast majority of systems.

There is one other way, though, which involves measuring the “wobble” in the star as the planets orbit. As the planet circles, it exerts a gravitational force on the star, causing it to wobble ever so slightly. This has allowed us to find planets that have a radius equivalent to the diameter of our Earth, but hopefully that size will shrink as we continue to develop new and more precise observational technologies.

The Scale of Atoms and Modern Processors

Posted on by conorastr201

Artist's Depiction of a Lithium Atom

Artist’s Depiction of a Lithium Atom

Everyone knows that atoms are small, but exactly how small is small? This new video by Kurz Gesagt explores this question, and the sheer scale is mind boggling to try to imagine.

Among the analogies used is that of filling rooms with rice grains; if the end of your finger was the size of the room, and you filled that room with rice, and then you took one of those rice grains, made it the size of a room, and filled it with rice, and then you took the space in-between and filled it with sand, you’d have atoms! I kept expecting him to stop, but the scaling down goes on and on to a size that is truly unimaginable.

However, as technology increases, we continue to work more and more with things on this kind of scale. The processor of a modern computer has billions of transistors on a single chip barely larger than a fingernail. The transistors have become so small that they are now about twenty-two nanometers across, or a mere fifty atoms. Even more than this, the transistors are now able to process information at an astonishing rate of one trillion instructions a second. It’s hard to imagine technology advancing further than it has already, but I am sure we will find a way.

Historical Astronomers in Context

Posted on by conorastr201

Johannes Kepler is remembered mostly for his discovery that the orbits of stellar objects are elliptical, as well as for his laws of motion, which he did using the observations gathered by Tycho Brahe. His work helped merge the ideas of physics and astronomy together. Additionally, he was prominent in the field of optics and developed a new version of the refracting telescope.

1607 – The first English colony is established on the North American mainland at Jamestown, Virginia. This marks the beginning of what would become the United States of America.

1582 – Pope Gregory XIII implements the Gregorian calendar. This calendar is still the international standard used today, which is pretty impressive considering it is over 400 years old.

There was a lot that went on during the early 1600s! Two incredibly important figures of astronomy were working simultaneously, one of the most famous books was being published, America was being settled, England was in turmoil with the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, Protestantism was grabbing hold, Francis Drake was circumnavigating the globe, the list goes on. They make up some of Man’s greatest accomplishments, and they were all happening concurrently, and they all still affect us to this day.