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    Planets, Stars, and Galaxies, Third Edition
    Planets, Stars, and Galaxies, Third Edition
    Planets, Stars, and Galaxies, Third Edition
    Ebook151 pages1 hour

    Planets, Stars, and Galaxies, Third Edition

    By Sophia Chen and Gordon Ritter

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    About this ebook

    The attempt to understand the universe's seemingly endless mysteries involves a process of discovery that can evoke fascination, frustration, and continual wonder and amazement. Planets, Stars, and Galaxies, Third Edition takes readers on an incredible full-color journey through the vast universe. This engaging title tackles the questions students studying science are eager to know: How large is the universe? Is it infinite or finite? What is its structure? Is it possible to visit other worlds, and if so, what similarities might they bear to our own world?

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherChelsea House
    Release dateSep 1, 2021
    ISBN9781646937363
    Planets, Stars, and Galaxies, Third Edition

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      Book preview

      Planets, Stars, and Galaxies, Third Edition - Sophia Chen

      title

      Planets, Stars, and Galaxies, Third Edition

      Copyright © 2021 by Infobase

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For more information, contact:

      Chelsea House

      An imprint of Infobase

      132 West 31st Street

      New York NY 10001

      ISBN 978-1-64693-736-3

      You can find Chelsea House on the World Wide Web

      at http://www.infobase.com

      Contents

      Chapters

      The Universe

      Mathematics of Motion

      Newton, Kepler, and Gravity

      Night Sky Observation

      Relativity

      Large-Scale Structure of the Universe

      Support Materials

      Glossary

      Bibliography

      About the Authors

      Index

      Chapters

      The Universe

      Our solar system is situated inside the Milky Way, one galaxy of an estimated hundreds of billions of galaxies inside our universe. From this perspective, it may seem small, but with a diameter longer than nine billion kilometers,¹ our humble solar system contains a multitude of astronomical objects, whose properties astronomers study to better understand our universe.

      Our solar system contains the Sun; the eight official planets (in order of increasing distance from the Sun: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune), at least six dwarf planets (Pluto is now classified as a dwarf planet), more than 150 satellites of the planets, and a large number of comets, asteroids, and floating debris. Some of the known planetary satellites (or moons) are themselves comparable in size to small planets. A large asteroid belt lies between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, containing an estimated nearly 1.1–1.9 million asteroids.² Even the planets show a lot of variety. From their sizes in the figure below, you may notice that Earth is very tiny compared to Uranus and Neptune, which are themselves tiny compared to Jupiter and Saturn, which are tiny when compared to the Sun. The four large planets make up more than 99% of the mass known to orbit the Sun.³

      Note that the distances to the Sun are not to scale.

      Source: Infobase Learning.

      Beyond Neptune lies the Kuiper Belt, a large shell of objects that begins at about 30 astronomical units, or AU, and extends outward to nearly 1,000 AU beyond the sun. (An astronomical unit equals about 150 million kilometers and is approximately the distance from Earth to the Sun.) In 1951, Gerard Kuiper suggested that comet-like debris left over from the formation of the solar system should be just beyond Neptune. Kuiper argued convincingly that it would be most unusual not to find a continuum of particles beyond the part of the solar system occupied by the large planets. He reasoned that since the large objects of the solar system were formed by the condensation of smaller particles, it is very unlikely for such a process of formation to form a sharp edge at its boundary. Since his prediction, astronomers have discovered some very remote and surprising Kuiper Belt objects using the Hubble Space Telescope, including, for instance, an ice planet half the size of Pluto. To date more than 2,000 objects in the Kuiper Belt have been identified.⁴

      All of the planets orbit the Sun, following elliptical paths (the precise definition of an ellipse will come later), just as Newtonian physics would predict. Each planet has its own orbital period, which is the time it takes to make one revolution around the Sun. For the Earth, this period is approximately 365 days, or one Earth-year. Each planet's elliptical orbit lies in a certain plane in three-dimensional space, and for our solar system, the planes for different planets are, in a first approximation, aligned. This means that you can think of the solar system as approximately a disk, where the planets orbit in the plane of the solar system.

      We know so much about the solar system today because of advances in both fundamental theoretical physics and in the science of observation, with one type of advance building upon previous advances. The Hubble Space Telescope gives us precise knowledge of distant parts of the universe that no one could have figured out through purely theoretical investigations, but without many important theoretical advances (such as Newtonian mechanics, general relativity, and electromagnetism), no one could have designed and built such a telescope. In the next section we will give an incomplete history of some of the most important scientific breakthroughs that enabled our current, fairly detailed understanding of the solar system to evolve into its present form.

      Physics History, Legend, and Folklore

      This section is dedicated to a brief, informal history of historical attempts to understand the motions of planets, stars, and galaxies, leading toward Isaac Newton's invention of calculus and of the associated theory of physics now known as Newtonian mechanics. Newton's mechanics included the first modern concept of force and the rules by which forces influence the motion of bodies. Newton achieved the first successful mathematical explanation of planetary motion. We will give a brief, modernized account of Newton's ideas in chapter two. While we now know his description of planetary physics is only approximately correct, the approximation is quite good even by modern standards. By the twentieth century, Einstein's general theory of relativity corrected Newton's mechanics, and it gives a description of the mechanics of our solar system that is accurate to many decimal places and has passed all experimental tests thus far.

      In Alexandria, Egypt around A.D. 150, Claudius Ptolemy wrote a seminal work on astronomy now called the Almagest. The Almagest consists of 13 books containing compilations of measurements of our solar system, with accompanying mathematical theories to explain them. It also explains Ptolemy's explanation for the motion of the universe.⁵ These theories ultimately proved of little use, because they do not explain fundamental physical processes, and thus, they do not lead to a general theory of mechanics. Instead, they are guesses about possible mathematical descriptions for the planets' motions, based on study of observational data.

      One fundamental flaw in Ptolemy's theory is that he based it on the Earth-centered (or geocentric) concept of Aristotle. This view of the universe presents the Earth's position as fixed, while other objects (such as the Sun, Moon, stars, and planets) rotate around it at the center. Modern physicists would agree that the statement the Earth is fixed has no intrinsic meaning, because it does not provide the answer to the question: Fixed with respect to what? Based on such premises, Ptolemy predicted the positions of the Sun, Moon, and planets using epicycles, the curves traced out by a point on a circle that rolls along another circle (see figure below). Many of these predictions do not match the data well, because the correct equations of motion are not those of an epicycle.

      Ptolemy used epicycles, the curves traced out by a point on a circle that rolls along another circle, to predict the positions of the Sun, Moon, and planets.

      Source: Infobase Learning.

      Modern reasoning would point out that even on Earth on a dark night, a brighter torch viewed at a greater distance may appear to be the same brightness as a smaller, nearer torch. Thus, we could never determine the distance to an object in the night sky by simply observing its brightness. The determination of distance in astronomy can be very difficult, for precisely this reason, and it generally must involve at least two measurements made from different points on the Earth's orbit.

      Though he lived long before Ptolemy, Aristarchus (310-230 B.C.) had a remarkably modern picture of astronomy. Although some of Aristarchus's most important writings were lost, it is generally believed that he proposed a heliocentric (or sun-centered) model 1,700 years before Copernicus,

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