A Tour of the Universe

As I make this slide, it is September 1 here in Okinawa. For you, it will be September 3. I hope you are being good students for Mrs. DeHaven

A Tour of the Universe

It is now my extreme pleasure to introduce you to

the Universe … from our home planet Earth out to the most distant galaxies at the

“edge” of space.

A Tour of the Universe

The Earth is where we start. Our home planet is the ONLY object in space where life exists as we know it. While we are finding evidence of water on Mars and some other moons, there are no other places so conducive to life as here. This ball of rock has a diameter of 12,756 kilometers and spins in 24 hours in a nearly circular orbit that lasts 365.25 years. If you look closely, maybe you can see Hopkins High School

A Tour of the Universe

Don’t even start with me … Americans have landed on the Moon, and the picture shows Neil Armstrong saluting the flag (ruffled because the lightweight material has not yet completely unfolded in the airless surface yet. The Moon is 3476 km in diameter (from New York to LA), but it is airless. While it has some gravity, you would weigh much less than here on Earth. The temperature in sunlight is 250F and at nighttime is -150F. The dark features were thought to be lakes and oceans when the Romans first gave names to them.

A Tour of the Universe

Mars is the planet most similar to Earth, but only ½ its size, yet there are some amazing differences. First, if you do not want to take a 7 month spaceship ride to cover the average 80 million km distance from Earth, you can get there via a memory implant like Arnold! Today, a spacecraft has landed on the ice cap, and after digging in has found clear evidence of water. Mars is home to the greatest canyon in space, and the highest mountain. Olympus Mons (above and right) has a base as big as Oregon and rises to an incredible height of almost 80,000 feet! That is almost three times higher than Mt. Everest.

A Tour of the Universe

Out past Mars and the asteroids lies the realm of the gas giant planets. Jupiter lies almost 800 million km from the Sun, and Saturn is almost 1.5 billion km away. These two planets are indeed giants. Jupiter can hold 1000 Earth’s inside, and Saturn’s rings space a distance almost the same as the distance from Earth to the Moon. It is so strange to think of it, but these planets are actual balls of gas and are turning around really fast … an average day lasting about 10 hours for each of them.

A Tour of the Universe

The planets of the Solar System are shown here, but not to scale. The order of the planets, from left to right is Mercury, Venus, Earth and Moon, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. Pluto was downgraded from the status as 9th planet to a “dwarf planet” back in 2006, and therefore does not appear in this picture. However, I still believe that Pluto deserves to be a planet, so we will treat it that way. So, you can learn the names and order of the planets as My Very Excellent Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas as an acronym for the planets. The other object in the picture is a comet.

A Tour of the Universe

The Sun is the center object of the Solar System. It is called a star because it creates light energy from thermonuclear fusion. The Sun is a giant ball of gas, with a diameter of 1,392,000 km, big enough to swallow 1.3 million Earths. The surface temperature is 6000K (over 9000F) and a core temperature over 15 million K. The Sun generates 384,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 watts of energy every second! Oh, when the Sun erupts giant plumes of gas, people in space and on Earth better watch out!

A Tour of the Universe

I love this picture. Our Sun is just one of 200 billion that exist in our galaxy. This is a view of some of those stars the way it looks when you point a telescope into the constellation Sagittarius. Every white dot in this picture is a star like our Sun.

A Tour of the Universe

The Earth seems pretty big when you look outside or go on a long drive across North Dakota. The Sun seems really when you consider that it is 1.3 million times bigger than the Earth. But the Earth and the Sun are NOTHING compared to what else is out there. Check on the link below … and hope that the connection works!

http://sizeofworldse.ytmnd.com/

A Tour of the Universe

Stars come in all kinds and sizes and in various stages of life, such as those that areforming (above) to those that are dying or dead (below).

A Tour of the Universe

Here are some stats about the last star on the video presentation. Its name is VY Canis Majoris. It lies 5000 light years away from Earth, and has a radius 2100 times bigger than the Sun. If the Sun were replaced by VY Canis Majoris, the outer edge of this hypergiant star would reach the orbit of planet Saturn. A Hubble photograph of the star is above left.

A Tour of the Universe

Stars have “lives,” and they all begin their livesas giant clouds of gas and dust as seen in thesethree photographs.

A Tour of the Universe

Stars have “deaths,” and they can die either in a gentle manner like the Red Giant (left) is currently dying, or explosively and violently as seen in the right image. Our Sun will die like the left photo, at which time the Earth will be pushed out of its orbit.

A Tour of the Universe

It is theorized that the early Universe formed clumps of gas, and within those clumps of gas, smaller clumps formed stars. A giant collection of stars is called a Galaxy. Here are some examples of galaxies.

A Tour of the Universe

Galaxies come in different shapes … from the most familiar (yet most rare) spiral forms to the less familiar (but most common) elliptical, and the unusual irregulars.

A Tour of the Universe

This is the most detailed and accurate depiction of the Milky Way. A picture such as this comes from thousands and thousands of pictures of individual stars and precise mapping of their exact location. This is a good place for ooohs and aaahs.

A Tour of the Universe

Now, here is where the cool stuff begins … galaxies do not exist singly, but are most often associated with other galaxies in clusters. The these clusters are collected into even larger Superclusters. A single supercluster can have 100 – 1000 galaxies and span many millions of light years.

A Tour of the Universe

And superclusters of galaxies are linked into long Filaments that intertwine on a scale of BILLIONS of light years. This is the organization of the Universe, and Filaments are the biggest structures.

A Tour of the Universe

And so, on those rare days when we teachers in the Science Department at Hopkins feel like we are something special, we can always look at the immensity of space and realize that, yeah … we are something special.