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Published byImogene Jennings Modified over 9 years ago
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The Overall Perspective Our Greatest Telescope Units of Measure The Cosmic Zoom Today!
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Perspectives On The Universe
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The ‘Overall’ Perspective
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It helped us discover…
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Supernovae, or exploding stars… Are less bright in the past than we would expect if gravity ruled the expansion of the universe.
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What the universe looked like shortly after the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago
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We can watch the planets closely as they change As in this Hubble Photo of the Martian Ice Caps.
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We have even discovered new planets in our solar system!
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We need tools with our overalls
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One tool is units of measurement
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Antoine Lavoisier of the French Academy of Science led the search for standards.
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The meter was decided to be 1/10,000,000 the distance from the North Pole to the equator. (0.2 mm off)
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These prefixes are used for multiplying many units: Example: The Gigabytes on your hard drive.
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Other units are sometimes used to measure Astronomical distances:
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Other units are sometimes used to measure Astronomical distances: The Astronomical Unit – Earth-Sun Distance used within the Solar System
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The Light Year is used for distances to stars 1 Light Year = nearly 7 trillion miles, The distance light goes in a year.
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The parsec is the astronomer’s unit For measuring large distances One PARSEC = 3.26 LY
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The unit of mass was taken to be the mass of One cubic centimeter of pure water. This is called the GRAM.
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You know, like the first, then the SECOND!
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The second is 86,400 th Of a mean solar day (Earth is slightly closer to the sun sometimes. Day varies by a few seconds. A mean solar day is the average.) Did you have a mean solar day Last summer?
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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.
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The Sumerians also liked the number sixty. Thus 60 minutes, Tick, tick, tick, tick and 60 seconds.
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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 10 -12 meters or 0.000000000001 meters.
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We can use powers of ten to do a… From the smallest to the largest scale.
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As a kid in San Diego I watched CAPTAIN ZOOM cartoon show!
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Smallest is the… 10 -33 cm!
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100 billion billion times larger is the proton, Or hydrogen nucleus.
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100,000 times larger than that Is the typical atom 10 -10 m
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A child is about ten billion times larger! Say 1m
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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!
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Our solar system—to Pluto is about a million times The size of the earth: 10 13 m
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100 million times broader is our Milky Way galaxy: 10 21 m The impressive spiral NGC 1232, which resembles the Milky Way.
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The visible universe: 100,000 times broader At 10 26 m Light can only have come to us from about 13.7 billion light years away.
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