- 3173 - PLANETS - travel time to each? So, we find a new planet, so what? We better be worrying about the planet we have. In 500,000 years our oceans will have evaporated due to the Sun turning into a Red Giant then a Planetary Nebulae. That is how much time we’ve got, if no other disaster hits us sooner. Whatever we figure out let’s hope they do the math.
- ----------------------- 3173 - PLANETS - travel time to each?
- Astronomy today has technology that is beyond the imagination. And, at the same time we have imagination far beyond our technology. Let me give you an example.
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- Astronomers observed a planet that transits in front of its star. It is 63 lightyears away in the Constellation Vulpecula. First, astronomers recorded the star’s light spectrum with out planet in front of it. Then, later, they obtained the light spectrum of the star with the planet and the planet’s atmosphere in front of it. Now, subtract the two spectrums.
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- What you have left is the spectrum of light trough the planet’s atmosphere. Analyzing that spectrum astronomers learned that the planet’s atmosphere was mostly sodium, that is salty air. The planet was too close to the star and too hot for life so knowing its atmosphere was no big excitement.
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- Astronomers found another gas giant planet with a methane and water molecule atmosphere. It is also 63 lightyears away. This was the first detection of an organic molecule on another planet ( HD189733b) This planet completes an orbit in 2 days and is too close and too hot to support life as we know it.
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- So the technique works and one of these days we are sure to discover a planet with water vapor and oxygen in its atmosphere, similar to our own. It there is liquid water and there is oxygen that means there is life there.
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- Free oxygen can only exist with life recreating it continuously. Oxygen binds with nearly everything, nearly everything oxidizes to some degree. So, if you find free oxygen in the atmosphere life must be creating it. On Earth free oxygen happened about 3,500,000,000 years ago. It was created by microbes and blue algae.
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- Ok, let’s say you found an Earth-like planet, now what?
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- Let’s get NASA to send a space probe to investigate. Right? This is only 63 lightyears away, close on cosmic terms. Our Milky Way Galaxy is 100,000 lightyears across. That seems like a short distance by comparison.
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- Our current rockets travel 10 miles per second, that is 36,000 miles per hour. That’s fast. Ok, how long would it take to get there?
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---------------- 63 lightyears * 5.88*10^12 miles/lightyear = 370*10^12 miles / 36*10^3 miles/ hour = 10^10 hours which is 1,140,000 years. Over one million years to get there and another 63 years to radio back to Earth that you made it. Tell the people living then, if any, what they found.
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-------------- Say the technology improves 10 fold and we build a rocket that could pass the Moon in 30 minutes traveling at 360,000 miles per hour. It will still take 114,000 years to get to the planet.
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- This is just not working for me. We have found life on another planet. We have to learn more. Let’s invent a rocket that can travel 1000 miles in one second. Then it is traveling 3,600,000 miles per hour. Now we got the journey down to 11,700 years, one way.
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- This space travel to the planets is nonsense. What are we going to do freeze dry our astronauts before they take off then thaw them out when they get there. After 500 generations I hope people still remember they are out there.
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- Or, they could just show up on a return trip 230 centuries from now. The computers on board would have been obsoleted 50,000 times by then. Our language would have changed so much we could not even understand each other.
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- So, we find a new planet, so what? We better be worrying about the planet we have.
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- In 500,000 years our oceans will have evaporated due to the Sun turning into a Red Giant then a Planetary Nebulae. That is how much time we’ve got, if no other disaster hits us sooner. Whatever we figure out let’s hope they do the math.
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- Time to each planet assuming we can double the speed of the Shuttle to 54,000 miles per hour. These are one way trips.
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---------------- Mercury -------- 27 days
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---------------- Venus -------- 52 days
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---------------- Mars -------- 109 days
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---------------- Jupiter -------- 365 days
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---------------- Saturn -------- 1.8 years
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---------------- Uranus -------- 3.8 years
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---------------- Neptune -------- 5.9 years
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---------------- Pluto ------------ 7.8 years
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- These times do not include the return trip. Nor the time to build and fuel another rocket.
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- -------------------------------------- Other reviews available about the planets:
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- 3154 - PLANETS - which one to move to? Venus is too toxic, hot, and inhospitable. Mars is deadly too. Just as Venus is extremely hot, Mars is frigid cold. Venus has a thick, poisonous atmosphere, but Mars has a paper-thin one. Mars has all that radiation exposure to deal with. How do we choose?
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- 3148 - PLANETS - in our Solar System? The order of the planets in the solar system, starting nearest the sun and working outward is the following: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and then the possible Planet Nine.
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- 3043 - PLANETS - how many are out there? We are content in thinking we have discovered the planets in our solar system. We have eight planets circling he Sun. Nine if you count Pluto. Then more planetoids are being discovered orbiting farther from the Sun than Pluto.
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- 2666 - PLANET NINE . I always thought that Pluto was Planet Nine. Then Pluto got demoted to a “ Dwarf Planet”. Now astronomers are telling us there are many more dwarf planet out there, and also one “real planet nine“. We still have more to discover in our own Solar System.
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- 2647 - PLANET NINE - may be a blackhole? One theory is that it is a “blackhole“. Maybe there is an ancient, grapefruit-size blackhole hiding out in our solar system. This tiny, heavy object might in fact take the place of a theoretical planet that might be tugging on other objects in our solar system. This so-called “Planet 9” could explain the math calculations and why we cannot find it.
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- 2448 - PLANET NINE - could it be a blackhole? Maybe there is an ancient, grapefruit-size blackhole hiding out in our solar system. This tiny, heavy object might in fact take the place of a theoretical planet that might be tugging on other objects in our solar system.
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- 2637 - FOURIER - Math Discovers Exoplanets. If technology continues to improve and astronomers can capture some reflected light from the exoplanet its spectroscopy can detect the elements that are in the planet’s atmosphere. Detecting the slightest sinusoidal wobble in the light spectrum and performing the Fourier transform on the data so the period of the orbiting object will pop out of the data, astronomers will detect Earth-size terrestrial planets orbiting other stars.
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- 965 - The chemistry of planet formation. . Astronomers are using 2 different methods to find these planets. The “Transit Method” and the “Radial Velocity Method”. With both of these methods we have to be lucky and happen to be viewing the planet orbits edge-on. If we are viewing the orbits face-on we can never discover planets with these methods.
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- 935 - Planet temperatures.
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- 928 - Planet formation. . Astronomers have found more than 4,000 planets in other solar systems. How they formed and how they contain such wide diversity is a new mystery. We thought we had a design for planet formation that matched our Solar System. In contrast, other solar systems are so diverse and supposedly formed out of chaos.
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- May 26, 2021 PLANETS - travel time to each? 919 3173
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--- Some reviews are at: -------------- http://jdetrick.blogspot.com -----
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--- to: ------ jamesdetrick@comcast.net ------ “Jim Detrick” -----------
--------------------- --- Wednesday, May 26, 2021 ---------------------------
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