August has always had the Perseid meteor showers. This year there was no moon so they were really good. And recently the Astro-guys say they have confirmed that the universe is dying. It seems that it has lost energy over the past decade. Well Astro-guys, so have most of the rest humanity; we are getting older you know.
We have had some first time things happen in Space this year.. First was the Pluto flyby. Maybe flyby isn’t right because it was a throw by. A while back we threw a rocket into space and aimed it towards Pluto. Then it sailed along for 9.5 years at some 31,000 miles per hour till it got there.
Just for grins that is further by about 17% more in millions of miles than Dallas is from here in just plain miles. It would take about 420 years if you could drive it and didn’t stop to sleep, eat, or relieve yourself.
Pluto was discovered as a planet in 1930. A few years back they decided to call it dwarf planet. That’s a little picky for me.
Then a week or so later these astro-guys found a new planet, a cousin to earth. They say it is pretty much like our planet and is circling a Star some 1400 light years distant. That is so many miles there isn’t room to print them. We would run out of space on the paper. As your recall a light year is the distance light travels in a year. Light travels at 186,000 miles per second. As my teacher would tell me; you do the math..
The real mystery to me is how they can see that far, if they do see that far? If it took 1400 years to get here what we are seeing now would have been what was happening in the 7th century. Earth was a mess then; Rome had fallen and Istanbul was Constantinople. That was 875 years before Columbus found us instead of China.
The big problem of how we can see stuff that far away relates to candle power. They tell me someone with good eyes can see a single candle at the end of a football field. I cannot confirm that is true, but I can see one across a room. I realize a star has many candles in it but I don’t really know how many that far-away star needs for us to see it. It would take a really big birthday cake to hold them all.
From the Moon the Earth looks pretty small. We are not really very far apart compared to light years. It is true that you can find some really beautiful pictures of nebula and stars taken with powerful telescopes. However, the fine print usually says something like computer enhanced.
This column is whimsical. However, it is August and these are the dog days of summer. When the Dog Star, Sirius, is up the Perseids start whizzing past.
