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Posts tagged astrophysics

the rocket equation

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the rocket equation is the reason we don’t live in the star trek universe. because a rocket has to carry all its fuel, it grows exponentially the further you want it to go.

rocket that goes up a few hundred metres? size of a water bottle.
rocket that goes into orbit? size of a dinosaur.
rocket that goes to the moon and back? size of skyscraper.

if we lived on a smaller planet with weaker gravity (like mars), space travel would be relatively easy. if we lived on a larger planet with stronger gravity (like saturn), space travel would be impossible. instead we live on earth, where space travel is only just possible, but incredibly difficult.

orbit

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despite what some hollywood movies where rockets fly up and miraculously start floating around tell you, almost all spaceships and satellites that stay in space are in an orbit. if you’re not orbiting a planet/moon/star you’re probably either flying away from it, or about to crash into it.

another way to think of this is spaceships don’t experience “zero gravity”, but “zero g-force”. right now you are experiencing 1g of g-force, because gravity is pushing you into the ground. if you jumped into the air you would feel 0g of g-force… until you hit the ground.

a spaceship in orbit never hits the ground, so it constantly experiences 0g. essentially it is falling… forever.

vulcan

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i really need to stop trying to explain complex relativity concepts in like two panels. i can barely fit the text.

interestingly the guy who speculated about the existence of vulcan wasn’t just any random astronmer. it was urbain le verrier, who used the exact same method to predict the existence of neptune based on the orbit of uranus in 1846. so statistically speaking when he said “there might be a planet here”, until then he was right 100% of the time.

magnetic tornado

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“magnetic tornado” sounds like the kind of technobabble you’d hear in an old star trek episode or a netflix original sci-fi movie.

wait, i hope no one from netflix is reading this. they might start getting ideas. O.O

mariner 10

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nasa’s mariner 10 was the first probe to ever visit mercury, making 3 flybys of mercury in 1974-75. the next one was nasa’s “messenger”, which orbited mercury from 2011-15, gathering much more detailed data of the planet. the third mission, europe & japan’s “bepicolombo” is on its way to mercury right now, and will make its first flyby this year on october 2, and then enter mercury’s orbit in 2025. get hyped people!

unfortunately we’ve never soft-landed on the planet and there currently aren’t any plans to. we have crashed into it though, which is something i guess. (rip messenger)

phases

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a fun consequence of the phases thing is the closer the inner planets are to earth, the less of them is visible. while venus, the closer of the two, is at its brightest during its crescent phase when it’s near earth, mercury is actually at its brightest during its full phase, when its furthest from earth. this makes mercury the only planet in the solar system to technically get brighter the further away from us it is, which is pretty weird.

speed of light

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well, this is definitely the nerdiest comic i’ve ever done. sorry to everyone who’s just here for the cute drawings.

this is a really counterintuitive concept, because “travelling through time” is the exact opposite of what it is in a time travel movie. if you travel quickly trough time, you actually get to the future slower (from your perspective).

if you want to “time travel” to the future, you need to move slowly through time (by moving really fast through space, like neutrinos) so that everything else ages much faster than you.

yeah i know it’s confusing. blame einstein, not me.

velocity

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fun fact: if you lie around in your room all day, you’ve technically moved further than someone who ran a marathon from east to west in the same time, relative to the centre of the earth.

unfortunately, fitness apps don’t seem to understand this for some strange reason.