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Showing posts with label Solar System. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Solar System. Show all posts
Our earth is constantly moving in cosmos space at a very high speed. There are three kind of movements our earth is making. The first movement is the rotation on its axis that gives us day and night. The second movement is the revolution around the sun that gives us cold and hot seasons. The third movement is the movement of whole solar system around the center of milky way galaxy.
Have you ever wondered how these movements first came into place? After the big bang everything started moving and the universe started expanding. In the beginning it was all hot dusts and clouds that began to condense & form solid celestial bodies. The same rotation speed remained until today. Imagine like rotating a spinning top that once you started rotating and it kept on rotating forever. The rotation of the earth in its axis is about 1675 km/hr. We all have been spinning with this speed all the time since our birth. This inertial rotation has remained forever since the formation of the earth because there has been no external force to stop it. In case of spinning top, it slows down and eventually comes to stop because it has frictional drag force with the ground surface and the air around it. If we would be able to neglect those frictions, the spinning top would also keep rotating forever. Now the questions arises, is our earth loosing any rotational speed? What will happen if our earth would start slowing down and eventually stop?
As a matter of fact, the earth gets about 1/2000th of a second slower every single day. This is because the rotation of earth on its axis is slowing down because of the tidal friction from moon. The gravitational pull between moon and earth is dragging the earth rotation a bit.
In other words, a day after 2000 days will be a second longer compared to today.
At this rate, the earth will completely slow down in 474,000 years from now. The moment will be like a roulette game. The side facing towards the sun will get day forever and it will get hotter and hotter. The opposite site will remain on the darker sider and it will be night forever. The night side will get colder and colder. The areas on earth between dark and night side will have forever mornings and forever evenings. But as the time passes, these two sides will remain isolated from each other. It will be difficult to travel from morning side to the evening side or vice-versa because the paths between them will have extreme temperatures. One side facing the sun will be extremely hot while the other side will be extremely cold.
Everything runs out of energy. Just like that, our earth will also someday come to a stop.
1. If the sun were to "turn off", the Earth would completely freeze within a week with a temperature of 0 degrees Fahrenheit even in the equator. In a year's time it would dip to -100 degree Fahrenheit, and millions of years later it would be a stable -400 degrees Fahrenheit.
2.The sun is getting hotter, becomming 10% more luminous around every billion years. This could mean that in a billion years, there will be no liquid water on Earth.
3. The sun is comprised of 72% hydrogen, 26% helium and other trace elements. These dense mass of gases makes up 99% of all the mass in our solar system.
4. The sun puts out a huge amount of energy to heat the solar system. Every second around 700 million tons of hydrogen are converted into helium ashes by the sun's fusion process.
5. The sun's surface is comparatively colder than its atmosphere, at around 6000 Kelvin. The atmosphere can reach 10,000K while the core is about 1 million Kelvin.
6. The sun is around 25,000 light years away from the center of the Milky way galaxy. It takes about 240 millions years to orbit once around the galactic center.
7. Different sections of the sun rotate at varied speeds, as it is made of gas. The equator regions rotate around every 25 days, whereas the poles take about 36 days to complete one rotation around the sun.
8. On some planetary bodies and moons, there exists a "peak of eternal light" where the sun never sets. This is due to the angle of rotational axis on relation to the sun.
9. The sun is middle aged. Astronomers believe it formed around 4.59 billions years ago. In 5 billion years time, it will enter the red giant phase of its life time.
10. 100,000,000,000 tons of dynamite would have to be detonated every single second to match the energy that the sun produces.
Source: universitytoday.com