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Angle between ecliptic and Milky Way

(Continuation)--About the year 2012

396A Posssibility of Asteroid Hitting Earth (1)
396B Posssibility of Asteroid Hitting Earth (2)

Reply

The shuttle orbits a 5 miles per second or 18,000 mph, so 1000 mph is a relatively small part. Still, spaceflight is so difficult and expensive that any small advantage is precious.

That is why the shuttle is launched eastwards from Cape Canaveral: its orbital velocity is measured relative to space and depends only on the Earth's gravity, which is the same whether the Earth rotates or not. Therefore, an eastward launch from Cape Canaveral already has an initial velocity in the right direction, and needs only add the remaining difference.

(More at http://www.phy6.org/stargaze/StarFAQ3.htm#q62)

Same with reentry! It helps if the shuttle approaches landing from the east, because then the rotation of the ground (and of the atmosphere) is already eastward at about 1000 mph. To match velocities with the ground (and the atmosphere) the shuttle only needs to lose 17,000 mph or so, less than otherwise.

If you remember the story of the break-up of the shuttle "Columbia," it planned to land at Cape Canaveral and it approached over California: the break-up was first seen above Arizona, and most of the debris came down in eastern Texas. It was approaching its landing from the east.

Concerning re-entry, you might also look up a recent letter at http://www.phy6.org/stargaze/StarFAQ12.htm#q191

205. Worrying about Wormholes and Black Holes

I have a question about space. A few weeks ago, I asked a friend if she was afraid of aliens like those seen in "War of the Worlds" and she said no, we (have) more reason to be afraid of the giant black hole at the center of the Milky Way. I knew we didn't have to worry about that, as it is billions of light years away.

But then I had a dream about it and awoke this morning with the theory that if a massive black hole opened a wormhole and sucked us right through the wormhole and into its center. Both teachers I told this to said I shouldn't worry about that (I never worry about drowning, but the supernatural is another story). But what do you think--is it at all possible? What would happen if we did get sucked in? Would it be, as my friend would call it, "an incredibly painful and excruciatingly long death" for everyone, or would it just me instant blackness? And are we at the mercy to this supposed black hole at the center of the galaxy? If so, how long does our planet have? How fast is it carrying everything in?

Okay. I'll stop bugging you now.

Reply

I am just a plain physicist and know nothing about wormholes. I know that astronomers have never seen anywhere a phenomenon which required wormholes for its explanation--and they do see some mighty weird stuff!

I looked up wormholes on the web, on "Wikipedia." There exists a lot of theoretical speculation, but I found nothing positive. Maybe it should be filed for now under science fiction, in the realm of things we cannot prove to be impossible, even though they have yet to be observed.

About the black hole at the center of the galaxy (whose distance is measured in thousands of light years, not billions), see my web page at
http://www.phy6.org/stargaze/Sblkhole.htm
There exist quite a few stars orbiting it, on what seem stable orbits. I would not like to live that close to the black hole--too many X-rays--but our solar system is at a safe distance.

Neither do I worry about aliens. My greater worry is that actually, no aliens exist anywhere in the galaxy. If so, we have the only planet which harbors life--a planet which in recent years we have been treating rather shabbily. Until we know better, we ought to assume that we may be the only guardians of the flame of life, and if so, we ought to do a better job!

206. What should I study?

(shortened)

I would like to find new ways to produce energy, like solar panels do, by converting some natural form of energy into electrical energy. I am enrolled in my first semester of Mechanical Engineering and working as an RN in a local hospital.

I am curious as to your advice on what I should be studying. My math is only at the level of Algebra I (I haven't had any math really in 7-8 years). Should I stay in Engineering? If so what field? Mechanical or electrical? Or should I go for a physics degree.

I would greatly appreciate your guidance, or else, ask others in your dept for their input and please write me back. I also thought about going back to school to get a degree in biology to do research in finding cures or vaccines for AIDS, Cancer, Herpes...Which I believe are all related because they have to do with changes in DNA/RNA.

Can you please give me some assistance. The tests I have taken say Engineering, then Medicine as a second choice. My family has a heavy background in electronics. I like classes like Chemistry, Physics, and Biology.

Reply

I hate to sound discouraging, especially in face of your enthusiasm, but there seems to exist a huge gap between where you are and what you are trying to reach.

Maybe I share some of the blame: the web pages I have created--carefully avoiding complex math and theory--may have done too good a job, in making the complicated seem simple to you. Front-line science is not simple, the simple stuff was all solved long ago.

This is particularly true in physics, which is very competitive, and where even reaching the starting line takes years of concentrated effort. My advice is--start with simple things. Improve your math: even the simple course in
http://www.phy6.org/stargaze/Smath.htm
will be useful (although a regular class ultimately gives wider grounding, besides putting pressure on you to persist). Improve your physics. Again, "Stargazers" has some useful material, but it falls short of a complete course, and is rather space-oriented. You certainly need the simple foundations: density, liquid pressure, buoyancy, levers, balanced forces, centers of gravity, calorimetry, electric circuits, basic optics.

And in any technical field these days, you may need to know about computers--also maybe to write computer code.

Anything new you learn may qualify you to a higher level. If you have some physics, math and computers, you can take a technical job. With more, and with related skills, you might get into engineering: there exist many more jobs for technicians and engineers than for physicists, an important consideration for making a living. What kind of engineering is best for you--and when you should branch off from general topics (like those mentioned above) to some specialization, that is where your judgement comes in. Such decisions depend on you, on your opportunities, perhaps on finding a good mentor or good training (with your background, maybe it will be related to the health field). Keep improving your hold on generalities until you decide you have reached that point.

If I can add something here, it is, technology and science are not everything: it also helps to get experienced in writing clearly and well. Reading books helps sharpen those skills, too.

207. The greenhouse effect

I'm 35 years old, married with one kid... and just want to help a cousin in an assignment in physics.

When a photon from the sun hits the surface of the earth, it may be reflected (in which case its energy goes into making a new photon of the same wavelength) or it may be absorbed. The energy from photons that are absorbed goes into heating the earth. The earth takes some of the absorbed heat and generates new photons in the infrared part of the spectrum.

Can those photons go through the atmosphere and into space, or are they trapped by the atmosphere? If they go into space, what happens to the temperature of the earth? If they're trapped, what happens to the temperature of the earth?

Reply

Your letter sounds as if you read part of my web page
http://www.phy6.org/stargaze/Sun1lite.htm
but stopped in the middle. Actually, that web page answers your question. The infra-red photons are radiated upwards from the ground, and if they could just continue to space (as they can from the surface of the Moon), they would just go on and get lost in space.

The atmosphere however absorbs those photons-- the molecules of "greenhouse gases" like water vapor, carbon dioxide and methane have "energy levels" in the infrared, able to absorb those photons. But what they absorb they can also emit, so that the infra-red bounces from one molecule to another, until it gets high enough to escape to space, around the altitude of jetliners. It's like rain hitting a forest--it does reach the ground (usually), but not before bouncing from branch to branch.

The temperature of the Earth is balanced between what comes in and what goes out--"radiation balance" in scientific language. The process is complicated by humidity and by "convection"--hot air rising, radiating some of its heat higher up, then descending. That's why we need big computers to model the weather! And as any kid nowadays knows, adding "greenhouse gases" slows down the upwards transmission of heat (in the form of infra-red photons) and shifts the radiation balance towards a warmer Earth.

Tell your cousin to read that section and maybe also the lesson plan linked from the top right corner.

208. Separation between lines of latitude and longitude

What is the distance in miles or kilometers between longitudes? Please and thank you!

Reply

Depends where you are! To paraphrase Neil Armstrong, it's one small step when you are near the pole, one giant leap near the equator.

Neglecting the ellipticity of the Earth, the length of the equator would be 40,000 kilometers (ellipticity adds about 74 km), making one degree of longitude 40,000/360 = 111.3 kilometers.

The average radius of the Earth is R = 6371 km (a few less than the 40,000 km value gives). At latitude L, the length of a line of latitude is 6.2832 R cosL (the factor is 2π), so one degree is (6.2832 R/360) cos L or about 111 cosL kilometers. As the latitude L increases, cos L gets smaller and smaller, and for people walking around the south pole (as some do at the South Pole Scientific Station) each degree is but one small step.

Follow-up:

How stupid can I be? Quite a lot evidently. I meant to type LATITUDE! Guess my brain was in a different place. Thank you.

Reply

That's easier. Assuming the Earth is a sphere, a line from the north pole to the southern one and back is just as long as the equator, and contains 360 degrees of latitude. So one degree of latitude corresponds to about 111 kilometres.

One degree also contains 60 minutes of arc, making one minute of latitude equal to about 1.85 kilometers. That distance is defined as a "nautical mile", and a velocity of one nautical mile per hour is "one knot", the common unit for measuring speed at sea.

Response:

Thank you so much. My nephew was interested in how much further north his home town of Red Deer, Alberta was from Kingston, Ontario. Now, with your help, it will be much easier to figure out. I know he is tricking me into doing his assignment for him, but when he calls me "his favourite aunt" what else can one do?

209. Motion of air: hot to cold, or high pressure to low?

I'm sitting in chemistry class right now as I type this, and I was just told that air moves from hot to cold. I already knew that matter moves from high pressure to low, so this makes no sense; cold air is of higher pressure than high. Which is true? Does are move from hot to cold or from high pressure to low pressure, and why?

Reply

Air (or any fluid, and matter too) moves in response to forces. If you want to understand motion, the question to ask is "what forces are involved?"

Pressure is force per unit area (look up in the dictionary; example: pounds per square inch, the PSI of tire pressure). So given an area A and a pressure P, the force on it is AP (A times P).

Suppose you have a cube with side equal to one unit (inch, or centimeter, or meter--whatever you work with; it helps to make a drawing here). The area A of each side is then one square unit. Suppose also that he pressure P₁ in the surrounding fluid (air, water or whatever) on the cube's right side is higher than the pressure P₂ on its left. So the force AP1 on the right side is greater the force AP2 on the left side. The greater force overcomes the weaker one and pushes the cube from right to left, from high pressure to lower one. That is a general rule.

The force which moves air from hot to cold is BUOYANCY--the tendency for lighter fluids to float up when surrounded by heavier (denser) ones--for example, oil floats to the top of water. You can prove (look up in a textbook) that with a cube (say) of light fluid immersed in a denser one, the net pressure P₁ on the bottom is larger than the pressure P₂ on the top. So it rises.

In the atmosphere, sunlight heats the ground, causing air there to heat up, too. Heated air expands and becomes less dense, and therefore rises (like a hot air balloon). As air rises, it expands and cools down. Such processes operate in the atmosphere all the time, so as you go higher (into high mountains, for instance), the air is cooler. As a result, "freshly heated" air rises only until its surroundings are just as cool.

It's more complicated, but my space here is limited. For more, look up http://www.phy6.org/stargaze/Sweather1.htm and the section which follows

210. Removing "Killer Asteroids"

I just discovered your site and fully enjoyed it. I was watching a program on Canada's Discovery channel about "Killer Asteroids" and how they might be pushed off course from a collision with the Earth. They first played with the idea of using Nuclear Weapons in a near explosion to push them to a new orbit but after the discovery of very porous meteorite material found in Northern British Columbia, it was determined that these type of Asteroids would absorb any energy from a near explosion thereby not changing their orbits.

It was then suggested that a Solar Magnifier could be stationed close to the Asteroid and by focusing the sun's rays at the Asteroid, burn a hole which would release energy pushing the Asteroid in to a different orbit away from Earth.

I then had the idea of an Ion Rocket landed on the surface of the Asteroid and used to gradually increase the push away from Earth's orbit, perhaps completely out of the Solar System. Could an Ion Rocket be used for such an application? Would it be to cost prohibitive? If needed, could not the Sun's rays be used to power the Ion Rocket?

This is what brought me to your site for research on Ion Rockets. Your thoughts on this would be greatly appreciated as the program did not even mention it.

Reply

I do not know who is responsible for the program on Canada's Discovery Channel, but your message suggests some rather loose thinking. The basis for ANY changes of asteroid orbit (as well for rocket design, and a lot more) is Newton's third law:

"Forces always arise in pairs, equal in strength but opposite in direction. If object A exerts a force F on object B, object B always exerts a force -F (same strength, opposite direction) on object A."

A nuclear explosion near an asteroid would vaporize the region closest to it, and the vaporized rock would stream away from the asteroid. By Newton's law, the force moving those vaporized molecules away from the asteroid would be exactly matched by a force pushing the asteroid in the opposite direction. Whether the asteroid is hard or soft makes no difference: the momentum transmitted to the asteroid is the same.

If that would be enough to save the Earth depends on circumstances. Even small asteroids are very massive, and their orbit would probably be modified only slightly. However, if one can intercept an asteroid years before its expected impact on Earth, that may be enough. Of course, even then it would still be in an orbit which can some day again come close to Earth (unless one can make it hit the Moon).

If the asteroid material is too loose, the vapors released (they blow in all directions) may also blow some of it apart. Indeed, a bomb dug into the asteroid may conceivably blast it apart completely, so instead of a single solid impact with Earth, we may end up with multiple impacts by many smaller objects. These may perhaps burn up in the atmosphere, but would still radiate a lot of heat. Whether that makes the impact less destructive or more so, I am not sure.

A "solar magnifier" does not exist, and I cannot imagine it. A large light solar mirror will be quickly pushed away by sunlight pressure... and anyway what would it accomplish? If you want to equal the effect of a nuclear bomb by evaporating part of the surface, you need deliver a comparable amount of energy. Hard to imagine!

Ion rockets are fragile devices whose thrust is measured in grams. Not enough to move an asteroid of billions of tons! Plus, they need a source of material to create the ions, and a source of energy to accelerate them. Solar energy, again, may suffice to accelerate a spacecraft (over months of time), but not a humongous hunk of rock.

211. Strange light seen from Hawaii

I live in Laie, HI. I looked out toward the east (the ocean) and noticed a bright red star. As I was looking at that star, I saw a meteor, or at least I think is a meteor. It was reddish orange in color and looked very close to the earth. It was much larger and broader looking than the meteors I'm accustomed to seeing, which are usually long, and thin. Any answers??

Reply

It would be very hard to tell what you saw. Did it move? It could be an airplane or satellite.

Meteorites arriving near the observer would not be reddish or orange--by the time they cool down to emit that color, they are already quite dim.

If I were to guess, you may have seen a flare dropped by a military airplane or fired from a ship, as part of some training exercise or a rescue effort. Flares are very bright and are meant to illuminate large areas below, and they descend slowly by parachute. They burn with a bright, white light (produced by magnesium, or by some other burnable metal, as in a firebomb), but since the one you saw was close to the ground, it was probably far off--perhaps beyond the horizon, made visible only by the bending of its light in the atmosphere.

As you know from the setting Sun, light near the horizon, which passes through a thick atmospheric layer, tends to take a reddish-orange color. Maybe that explains what you saw. You may ask someone in the coastguard about it.

212. Is the Sun attached to another star?

Good day Dr. Stern,
Would you let me know if our Sun has a central Sun? Does our Sun have a planetary orbit around another star?
Many thanks for your outstanding web page,

Reply

As far as I know, the answer is no. If any ordinary star existed close enough to hold the Sun, it would be the brightest one in the sky, by far. It could of course be a burned-out star, or a black hole (in which case, the motion, strictly speaking would not be around that other object, but against the common center of gravity).

The problem is that the Sun and the solar system are moving through space towards the "solar apex" (look it up) at about 20 km/sec. That is more than the orbital velocity around any distant object. Of course, that distant object could move at the same velocity, too.

In my estimation, chances are very much against it. Another clue may come from tracking distant space probes: do they indicate an influence other than the gravity of the Sun and the known planets? It turns out that a small discrepancy exists with the Pioneer spacecraft, but no one has yet mentioned another star as its source.

So take it from there. My guess is, unless clear proof arrives, we are alone in space.

213. What if the Sun turned into a black hole?

What would happen to the Earth if the Sun's mass suddenly collapsed to within its Schwarzschild radius and became a black hole? I know the Sun is not large enough to actually collapse to a blackhole, but it would be interesting to know what would happen to a planet orbiting a star that did become one. Would it spiral inward to be engulfed by the black hole or just move into a much smaller orbit? I'm very interested in the answer, especially after reading your articles on how hard it would be to actually reach the Sun from the Earth.

Reply

I have no special expertise in those areas, but I believe the gravitational attraction would remain the same, and therefore, so would the Earth's orbit.

Of course, life would quickly end. After being burned crisp by the energy released from the collapse, Earth would get very, very cold.

Stars near a black hole do not spiral inwards. A huge black hole exists near the center of our galaxy, and quite a few stars orbit it (in Keplerian ellipses), and apparently have been doing so for a long time. In fact, I recall reading somewhere recently that new stars appear to be forming at a high rate in that vicinity. For more, see http://www.phy6.org/stargaze/Sblkhole.htm.

214. Do absorption lines have a Doppler shift?

We are studying atomic physics at school which involves the electromagnetic spectrum. We have been shown the absorption spectra for various substances. We have also been shown how if an object like a star is moving towards Earth the Fraunhofer lines will shift slightly to the blue end of the spectrum in a blue shift, and if the star is moving away the Fraunhofer lines will shift slightly to the red end of the spectrum in a red shift.

My question is why is it the Fraunhofer lines which shift, as I would have thought the atoms in the atmosphere of both Earth and the star would absorb the same frequency of light regardless of the movement of the star or Earth? I asked my physics teacher and he did not know the answer.

Reply

Imagine an absorption line in the spectrum of a star. To its right and left in the spectrum are bright emissions, which get shifted by the Doppler effect due to the relative motion between the star and us, in the same direction (to the red or the blue). Would the dark gap between them shift the same way?

It would, if the dark absorption feature is caused by gas at the star. It would not, if it is caused by absorbing gas in the atmosphere of the Earth, which is one of the ways we can tell apart absorption that happens THERE from the one happening HERE.

Again, physics adds some interesting details. You know that spectral frequencies are very, very narrowly defined. One Fraunhofer line due to calcium, for instance, has a wavelength 422.6742 nanometer, defined to 7 decimal figures. However, if you split sunlight in a spectroscope and look for spectral emission lines from various elements, you will find each covers a certain spread of wavelengths. One reason is the Doppler effect: the solar envelope is hot, which means its atoms have large random velocities. Some happen to be approaching us when they emit light, some are moving away, and the Doppler effect shifts their wavelengths in opposite directions. As a result, when the wavelength spread of a spectral line is examined (and instruments exist--interferometers--which do so very well) we get a sort of bell-shaped curve, peaking at the appropriate wavelength, but spread to both sides (a pressure effect can also contribute).

However, there may be something interesting about this curve. Sometimes we see a dip right at the peak, because above that emitting region, there may be a cooler absorbing region (temperature may go down with height for a short distance before--on the Sun--it goes up again). The absorption line is narrower because, being cooler, it has less of a Doppler effect.

You must have a good school, if it teaches atomic physics! You can find more of it in "Stargazers", the section on the Sun.

215. What are "Electromagnetic Waves"?

I just wanted to know how electromagnetic radiation is used to gain information about the universe. I can't seem to find what I am looking for anywhere.

Reply

Scientists (unfortunately) use a somewhat technical language, and often do not realize that this creates problems for non-scientists.

Electromagnetic radiation is another name for light, and for wave phenomena which are similar to light but with longer or shorter wavelengths: radio, microwave, infra-red, ultra-violet, X-rays and gamma rays are all electromagnetic waves.

So electromagnetic waves are the ONLY source (with a few exotic exceptions) through which we get information about the universe outside Earth.

The astronomer Martin Harwit used this fact to ask, what is the maximum information such waves CAN give us about the universe? He made a chart of all the wavelengths, and the resolution we can get in each (how small and faint are the details we can see), and then pointed out where unobserved "gaps" remained. Most were in wave lengths which the atmosphere does not let through, so to fill them meant setting up observatories in space. NASA's "great observatories" programs tries to fill those gaps--for instance, the "Chandra" X-ray telescope.

What makes light etc. "electromagnetic"? The connection between light and electricity was only found by James Clerk Maxwell about 150 years ago. Look up
http://www.phy6.org/Education/wemwaves.html
and
http://www.phy6.org/stargaze/Sun5wave.htm
and sites linked there, for the intuitive meaning of the connection. It is not a simple one, and to fully understand it you would need some rather complicated math.

216. Why are the two daily tides unequal?

Ocean tides on the west coast of the United States are mixed tides, usually two high tides and two low tides per day. The two highs and two lows are uneven. There is a higher high and a lower high, and a higher low and a lower low. Why do the lower low tides occur in the daytime during summer and in the night time during winter?

Reply

I am just an ordinary retired physicist, specializing in magnetic fields and trapped particles in space... not in tides! Still, I tried to find out for you by asking Google about "Atlantic Tides." On the west coast, the situation is probably similar. I regret to report that the reason is rather complicated.

A rather thorough description of tides existed on the web (but was gone in 2016), starting from
http://www.aviso.oceanobs.com/html/applications/marees/200010_uk.html
and continued to a lot of detail. Basically, the tide is a world-wide wave excited in the ocean by the gravity of the Moon and Sun, and it has two components:
the M2 component with two peaks a day, and
the K1 component with one such peak.
If we just had the Moon circling the equator, that would (according to the above web page) excite the M2 wave alone, two equal peaks a day. However, the axis of the Earth is tilted, and that adds a K1 wave.

You can see that the sum might very well give an asymmetric pair--once a day K1 adds to the M2 peak, 12 hours later it subtracts. The tilt of the northern hemisphere is opposite in the summer and winter (sunward at noon in the summer, away from the sun in winter), so maybe that explains what you claim happens.

The exact addition of the waves depends on the relative timing of the peaks, which I believe is affected by shorelines and the shapes of the ocean bottom. These factors also add higher frequency, so the calculation of tides is a complicated art, based on large collections of tide data. I would guess you can find out a lot more from that web site.

217. Why air gets cold higher up--a wrong explanation

Today, I was researching why temperature drops as elevation increases and I came across an explanation on an ask-the-expert website that I just don't buy.

It said that just as a baseball loses kinetic energy and gains potential energy as it rises in its trajectory, the air molecules lose kinetic energy as they rise.

Here is the actual quote:

"When the warm air rises, the speed of those air molecules slows down just like a ball that is thrown into the air slows down. The molecules convert their kinetic energy into potential energy when they rise into the air just like the ball did. And since temperature is a measure of kinetic energy, the lower kinetic energy means a lower temperature."

Reply

You are right in questioning that "explanation." Actually, it IS correct above an altitude of about 100 kilometers, the approximate level of the last collision of air molecules. Since their thermal speed is much less than escape velocity, they rise in parabolas (more accurately, sections of ellipses) and ultimately fall back. That is the Earth's "exosphere."

But where you and I live, temperature drops with altitude for a simpler reason. The Sun heats the ground, and unless this heating were to continue indefinitely (to where the oceans would boil, etc...) that heat must be returned to space. It is a complex process, involving convection and also infra-red radiation, which is emitted, absorbed and re-emitted by greenhouse gases as it works its way up, until at about 10-12 kilometers (typically) such radiation can continue to space.

In all these processes, heat flows upwards, and as we all know, heat only flows (unaided) from higher temperature to a lower one.

For more, see
http://www.phy6.org/stargaze/StarFAQ4.htm#q73
http://www.phy6.org/stargaze/Sun1lite.htm
See also question #207 on this page.

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Author and Curator: Dr. David P. Stern
Mail to Dr.Stern: stargaze("at" symbol)phy6.org .

Last updated 10 May 2005 Edited 1 November 2016

Get a Straight Answer

Please note!

Items covered:

203. Superconductors work, universe expands--with no energy input. Why?

Reply

204. Shuttle orbit and Earth rotation.

Reply

205. Worrying about Wormholes and Black Holes

Reply

206. What should I study?

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207. The greenhouse effect

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208. Separation between lines of latitude and longitude

Reply

Follow-up:

Reply

Response:

209. Motion of air: hot to cold, or high pressure to low?

Reply

210. Removing "Killer Asteroids"

Reply

211. Strange light seen from Hawaii

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212. Is the Sun attached to another star?

Reply

213. What if the Sun turned into a black hole?

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214. Do absorption lines have a Doppler shift?

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215. What are "Electromagnetic Waves"?

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216. Why are the two daily tides unequal?

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217. Why air gets cold higher up--a wrong explanation

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