Share Some Astronomical Trivia

[Paul M]

5000 years Thuban (Beta Draconis) was the Pole Star.

Earth's axis wobbles relative to it's orbital plane therefore the poles sweeps a circle against the background stars. It's purely by chance (and extremely convenient) that Polaris currently sits almost bang on the north celestial pole.

[Knight of Clear Skies]

How about a trivia question for you all.

Which star will be the brightest in the sky several million years from now?

I'm intrigued. It's not possible to predict the motions of the stars very accurately over millions of years, so I'd guess that it's a star which will increase in brightness in this timeframe rather than one which will make a close approach. Perhaps a star which is due to leave the main sequence and become a red giant?

[Beulah]

The moon moves away from us at the rate of around 4cm a year.

[mdstuart]

The answer according to sky and telescope is Y Draco...its currently mag 2 and moving towards us..

Mark

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[Paul M]

How about a trivia question for you all.

Which star will be the brightest in the sky several million years from now?

hint..it is overhead in July and 150 light years away at the moment.

mark

I guess it will still be our Sun, but you're about out with the distance

[mdstuart]

Paul

You made my wife happy. She loves it when I am outsmarted.

Y Draco will get to within a few light years of us at closest approach but you are right the sun will still be brighter!

Mark

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[Knight of Clear Skies]

It was long thought that most stars resided in multiple star systems. This is true for larger stars, but not for red dwarfs, which are the most common type of star.

The answer according to sky and telescope is Y Draco...its currently mag 2 and moving towards us..

Mark

Oh well, looks like I was barking up the wrong tree.

[badgerchap]

Many astronomers are lunatics - from the word 'luna', lunatic means 'moonstruck'. So when the Missus (or Mister) tells you you're a lunatic for hanging around in the dark all night, you can tell her/him that's the whole point!

[ollypenrice]

Great thread. To confirm the lunatic astronomers post...

It was the ambition of the great 20th Century astronomer Bart Bok to urinate directly into all the great rivers of the world.

Edwin Hubble's cat, Nicholas Copernicus, was frightened of Fred Hoyle. (So were a number of other people...)

George Ellery Hale, great observatory director and solar astronomer, once challenged two other motorcyclists to a race. They were... Police motorcyclists and arrested him.

Fritz Zwicky, who first proposed the existence of Neutron Stars, was so bad tempered that a colleague suggested that the Zwicky be adopted as the name for a unit of abrasiveness. Another objected that no comparably abrasive substance existed on Earth and that the unit should be called the Micro-Zwicky.

Percival Lowell got so far ahead of himself in thinking he could see canals on Mars that he even propsed that Martians were Republicans since this was the only political system capable of working effectively on a global scale.

His observatory director was convinced that the spectrosopist Rudolf Minkowski was unable to get through a night in the Prime Focus Cage with smoking and claimed to detect ash on the primary mirror of the telescope.

Olly

[Knight of Clear Skies]

Percival Lowell got so far ahead of himself in thinking he could see canals on Mars that he even propsed that Martians were Republicans since this was the only political system capable of working effectively on a global scale.

Ah, the dangers of insufficient aperture married to an excitable imagination. His observations of Venus weren't any more successful. Rather than featureless clouds he reported seeing a central black spot and spoke like features; he may have been seeing the shadows of the blood vessels in his eye, like you see when your optician shines a bright light into them, turning his telescope into a giant opthalmoscope.

[MrPloppy]

A duck's quack does echo, just like any other noise.

Sorry. Wrong forum.

[Dan Leach]

The cosmic microwave background radiation, which some people call 'the echo of the big bang', is not actually from the time of the big bang, but 400,000 years later. This was the time when the first atoms formed, and light could travel freely for the first time.

[Paul M]

The Moon's path through space is always concave relative to the sun.

The Moon doesn't actually orbit Earth. They both orbit a common centre of gravity. That point lies inside Earth!

[Ganymede12]

The Moon doesn't actually orbit Earth. They both orbit a common centre of gravity. That point lies inside Earth!

This common centre is called the Barycentre and in the case of the Sun/Jupiter orbit the Barycentre lies outside of the sun!

[Paul M]

This common centre is called the Barycentre and in the case of the Sun/Jupiter orbit the Barycentre lies outside of the sun!

I've never come across that little fact before.

If I'd had to put money on it I'd have guessed at it being not far from the centre of the sun!

No wonder the Three Body Problem is such a problem!!

[Knight of Clear Skies]

Going back to Percival Lowell, his conception of Mars as a drying, dying world inspired an entire generation of Sci-Fi writers, particularly H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds.

Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.

Its physical condition is still largely a mystery, but we know now that even in its equatorial region the midday temperature barely approaches that of our coldest winter. Its air is much more attenuated than ours, its oceans have shrunk until they cover but a third of its surface, and as its slow seasons change huge snowcaps gather and melt about either pole and periodically inundate its temperate zones. That last stage of exhaustion, which to us is still incredibly remote, has become a present-day problem for the inhabitants of Mars. The immediate pressure of necessity has brightened their intellects, enlarged their powers, and hardened their hearts. And looking across space with instruments, and intelligences such as we have scarcely dreamed of, they see, at its nearest distance only 35,000,000 of miles sunward of them, a morning star of hope, our own warmer planet, green with vegetation and grey with water, with a cloudy atmosphere eloquent of fertility, with glimpses through its drifting cloud wisps of broad stretches of populous country and narrow, navy-crowded seas.

(Underlining mine.)

This common centre is called the Barycentre and in the case of the Sun/Jupiter orbit the Barycentre lies outside of the sun!

Pluto-Charon is another system where the barycentre is outside the larger body. Here's a diagram of their orbits:

[Ganymede12]

The sun takes 220 million yeas to orbit the Milkyway galaxy. So far it has done so 20 times.

Buzz Aldrin's mother's maiden name was Moon!

A Higgs Boson only exists for one Zeptosecond, which is a thousandth of a billionth of a billionth of a second.

Since being discovered in 1930, Pluto has only travelled a third of it's way around the Sun.

There are a billion times more bacteria in a tonne of soil than there are Stars in the Milkyway.

[adder001]

On 05/24/2013 at 18:26, Helen said:

The Sun's poles switch polarity at roughly 11 year intervals, but the north and south poles don't necessarily switch at the same time, so they can both have the same polarity for a while.

Helen

Would that be the reason for the sunspot cycle?

[Stub Mandrel]

On 30/05/2013 at 08:59, Ganymede12 said:

Since being discovered in 1930, Pluto has only travelled a third of it's way around the Sun.

Before 1999 Pluto was closer to the sun than than Neptune.

"There is no dark side of the moon. as a matter of fact, it's all dark."