The Overall Perspective Our Greatest Telescope Units of Measure The Cosmic Zoom Today!

Perspectives On The Universe

The ‘Overall’ Perspective

It helped us discover…

Supernovae, or exploding stars… Are less bright in the past than we would expect if gravity ruled the expansion of the universe.

What the universe looked like shortly after the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago

We can watch the planets closely as they change As in this Hubble Photo of the Martian Ice Caps.

We have even discovered new planets in our solar system!

The James Webb Space Telescope, going up in 2018, will focus on infrared light, because light from the earliest objects is extremely red-shifted. It will placed at a point about a million miles from earth, where the gravity of the earth and sun are balanced. It may change our whole understanding of Cosmology, dark matter & dark energy!!!

We need tools with our overalls

One tool is units of measurement

Antoine Lavoisier of the French Academy of Science led the search for standards.

The meter was decided to be 1/10,000,000 the distance from the North Pole to the equator. (0.2 mm off)

These prefixes are used for multiplying many units: Example: The Gigabytes on your hard drive.

Other units are sometimes used to measure Astronomical distances:

Other units are sometimes used to measure Astronomical distances: The Astronomical Unit – Earth-Sun Distance used within the Solar System

The Light Year is used for distances to stars 1 Light Year = nearly 7 trillion miles, The distance light goes in a year.

The parsec is the astronomer’s unit For measuring large distances One PARSEC = 3.26 LY

The unit of mass was taken to be the mass of One cubic centimeter of pure water. This is called the GRAM.

You know, like the first, then the SECOND!

The second is 86,400 th Of a mean solar day Did you have a mean solar day Last summer? Sunburn?

The Sumerians (Iraq) Started it all with a god And goddess for each sign Of the zodiac Thus the watch of each one Was an hour.

The Sumerians also liked the number sixty. Thus 60 minutes, Tick, tick, tick, tick and 60 seconds.

Another tool is Powers of 10: Big number--a Gigabyte is 10 9, or a one with nine zeros --a billion. Little number—a femtometer is meters or meters.

We can use powers of ten to do a… From the smallest to the largest scale.

As a kid in San Diego I watched CAPTAIN ZOOM cartoon show!

Smallest is the… cm!

100 billion billion times larger is the proton, Or hydrogen nucleus.

100,000 times larger than that Is the typical atom m

A child is about ten billion times larger! Say 1m

If you got 10 million kids to lay down in a straight line Head to foot, they could span the earth: 10 million meters! They would LOVE it!

Our solar system—to Pluto is about a million times The size of the earth: m

100 million times broader is our Milky Way galaxy: m The impressive spiral NGC 1232, which resembles the Milky Way.

The visible universe: 100,000 times broader At m Light can only have come to us from about 13.7 billion light years away.