PL Lecture 1 a Grand Tour of the Heavens 09 January, 2012 (Read Chapter 1 As Background for Lecture Notes)

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PL Lecture 1 A Grand Tour of the Heavens 09 January, 2012 (Read Chapter 1 as background for lecture notes) I. A Sense of Scale in the Universe Note: Consult Appendix 2 for a list of astronomical constants, and Appendix 1 for the units of measurement in the metric system … . Recall the movie “Cosmic Voyage” shown in class to remember how “empty” the Universe appears to be in-between the stars and galaxies. Object Typical distance measures Earth – meters (m), kilometers (km) Solar System – Astronomical Units (AU = 150 billion meters) Nearest Stars – parsecs (pc = 30 thousand trillion meters) Our Galaxy -- kiloparsecs (kpc = 30 million trillion meters) Nearest Galaxies – megaparsecs (Mpc = 30 billion trillion meters) Most distant Galaxies – gigaparsecs (Gpc = 30 trillion trillion meters) II. Scientific Notation Astronomers use a “powers of 10” form of scientific notation, where the number of places to the right that the decimal point needs to be moved is given as an exponent of 10. Examples: 1.0 x 103 meters = 1,000. meters = 1 thousand meters = 1 kilometer 1.0 x 106 meters = 1,000,000. meters = 1 million meters = 1 megameter 1.0 x 109 meters = 1,000,000,000. meters = 1 billion meters = 1 gigameter III. A Sense of Time Most astronomical events outside our solar system take place over very long periods of time as compared to days or years, or even our lifetime. Earth Day -- 24 hours Earth Year -- 365.24 Earth days Age of Solar System -- 4.6 billion Earth years Age of Universe -- approximately 13.6 billion Earth years IV. “Value” of Astronomy Historically – Understanding the Earth’s motion and the motion of the planets with respect to the Sun allowed the development of calendars for tracking the seasons. Understanding of the motions of the planets helped confirm the physical laws of gravity and the laws of motion. Today – The laboratory provided by the Universe is the only means available for testing how the laws of physics behave at the highest energies (i.e. greater than that possible to simulate in laboratories on Earth). For example, recent discoveries of the mass of the neutrino (Nobel Prize in Physics, 2002), and the prediction of the existence of “Dark Matter” and “Dark Energy” (Nobel Prize in Physics, 2011) were made possible via astronomical observations. .

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