The end of our star and the end of this project. It is time to say goodbye, and time for us to nap for a few weeks. Who would have thought traveling through space and immediatly doing relativity experiments would be so exhausting.
Last time our star was born, but what will its life be like?
Phew, that was a lot of relativity. Time to end on a brighter note. Haha.
Imagine a whirlpool, but it's not a pool, and it's doesn't whirl.
So far we've explored special relativity and some general relativity too. It turns out that in general relativity we do not view gravity as a force, but rather as an effect of acceleration! It's time we explored the consequence of this.
You've seen how acceleration can be linked to the force of gravity, in relativity. We will now (shortly) show you how we can link the twin paradox to gravitation!
Don't try this at home.
So far we've looked at relativistic dynamics, how relativity affects time, distances, and even the Doppler effect. What about momentum and energy?
Don't worry, we know how much you love frames and events and how it isn't confusing or difficult to keep track of at all, so we're going to look at some more! Did you know that the speed of light is constant for all observers? Yes? Good, let's repeat it a few times more to really drive the point home.
You have a twin! And she's an astronaut! Cool B)
There's been a lot of new information in the three last posts, and not it's time to put them to use, as we have a look at the twin paradox. This will be a pretty long post, but we've tried to keep it simple, and split up the paradox a little, so that you can take a break if you want to <3 We wanted to include as much as possible, in order to give you the full picture!
when will the laser reach your rocket's tip?
In 1878 professor Philipp von Jolly advised his student Max Planck not to go into physics, as "in this field, almost everything is already discovered, and all that remains is to fill a few unimportant holes." Planck allegedly replied that he only wanted to understand the known fundamentals of the field, and proceeded to discover quantum physics.
So physics wasn't quite solved after all. And if quantum physics wasn't enough, soon one Albert Einstein would publish a paper on special relativity and blow everyone away to the point where we use his name as a synonym for really smart. Crazy times.
If you're strapping your butt to a rocket, I think that's worth something.
Time to turn our nose down and crash into our planet (but in a controlled sort of way).
Our mission? Find a place to land, and then land on it!
In the last post we spoke about spectral lines and what molecules we expect our atmosphere consists of. Now it's time to make use of this information, in order to make a model of our atmosphere.
I'm feeling 0K though.
So huge in fact, that if you lost your car keys in it, they would be almost impossible to find. We didn't bring any keys, but even a whole spacecraft can easily be lost up there, which is why we have our navigation software to tell us when we're off course. What course? The one we plan to chart right now!
Try saying 'trilateration' three times in a row.
Imagine for a minute that there is nothing at all around you. You are in a void, floating with no destination in mind. Or, are you floating? How can you tell how fast you are moving, if there is nothing around you, if you can't feel the wind in your hair or see objects flying by? When we send things into space, we realize more than ever that velocity is relative. We measure velocity in relation to other objects. On Earth, we can measure velocity against objects that are (seemingly) standing still, but in space we don't have that luxury. We need to find a way to measure velocity against objects that are not standing still.
We are very close to take off, promise! But we're not going with our spacecraft, we'll be navigating from the ground. Therefore, we're going to equip our spacecraft with a program that will enable us to get a read on which direction we are heading, how fast we are going, and where we are! First, which direction are we heading? We have acces to a camera aboard our space craft. But the thing about cameras, is that they tend produce be, well... flat images. And real life, as you may have noticed, is not flat. This is normally not a problem if you simply want to take a picture of a friend or your lunch, but when in space, figuring out where we are and where we're looking we need to account for the fact that space isn't flat.
