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Get a Straight Answer

Please note!

    Listed below are questions submitted by users of "From Stargazers to Starships" and the answers given to them. This is just a selection--of the many questions that arrive, only a few are listed. The ones included below are either of the sort that keeps coming up again and again, or else the answers make a special point, often going into details which might interest many users.

For an index file listing questions by topic, click here.


Items covered:

  1. About asteroids hitting Earth.
  2. The swirling of water in a draining tub.
  3. Dispensing water at zero-g.
  4. Robert Goddard and World War II.
  5. Asymmetry of the Moon's orbit.
  6. Measuring distance from the Sun.
  7. Who owns the Moon?
  8. Acceleration of a rocket.
  9. Rebounding ping pong balls (re. #35)
  10. Rebounding ping pong balls and gravity-assist
  11. Why don't we feel the Sun's gravity pull?
  12. How hot are red, white and blue (etc.) stars?
  13. How does the solar wind move?
  14. The shape of the orbit of Mars
  15. What if the Earth's axis were tilted 90° to the ecliptic?

  16. Mars and Venus
  17. Where is the boundary between summer and winter?
  18. The Ozone Hole
  19. What keeps the Sun from blowing up?
  20. Those glorious Southern Skies!
  21. Should we fear big solar outbursts?
  22. Planetary line-up and the sunspot cycle
  23. What are comet tails made of?
  24. If light speed sets the limit, why fly into space?
  25. Does precession mis-align ancient monuments?
  26. Why does the Earth rotate? Why is it a sphere?
  27. What's so hard about reaching the Sun?

  28. Where does space begin?
  29. Gravity at the Earth's Center
  30. Radiation hazard in space (3 queries)
  31. "Danger, falling satellites"?
  32. The Lagrangian L3 point
  33. Distance to the Horizon on an Asteroid
  34. Overtaking Planets
  35. Falling Towards the Sun
  36. The Polar Bear
  37. Are the Sun's Rays Parallel?
  38. More thrust in reverse than going forward?
  39. The varying distance between Earth and Sun
  40. Mission to Mars
  41. Kepler's calculation
  42. The Appearance (Phase) of the Moon

  43. Stability of Lagrangian points
  44. Can an Asteroid Impact Change the Earth's Orbit?
  45. Can Gravity Increase with Depth?
  46. Lightspeed, Hyperspace and Wormholes
  47. Why do Rockets Spin?
  48. Around What does the Sun Revolve?
  49. Why are planets in nearly the same plane?
  50. The Shapes of Rockets and Spacecraft
  51. Space Debris
  52. Teaching Nuclear Fusion
  53. Contribution of different elements to Sunlight
  54. Jewish Calendar
  55. Spaceflight Without Escape Velocity?
  56. Who first proposed a round Earth?
  57. Does Precession change the Length of a Year?
  58. The Analemma
  59. Changes of the Polar Axis of Earth
  60. Van Allen Belt and Spaceflight
  61. Nearest Star Outside Our Galaxy
  62. (a) Why are Satellites Launched Eastward?
          What is a "Sun Synchronous" orbit?
     (b) Why are satellites launched from near the equator?
  63. How Tall Can People Get?
  64. Gunpowder and Rockets
  65. Precession
  66. Solar Sails
  67. (a) Distance to the Big Dipper
     (b) Big Dipper star names

  68. Was Moon landing a hoax?
  69. Clockwise or counter-clockwise?
  70. Isotopes in Center of Earth
  71. Density of the Sun's corona and the "Scale Height"
  72. Did Tesla extract free energy from thin air?
  73. What does "lapse rate" mean?
  74. Motion of the Sun through space
  75. Teaching about tides
  76. Distance to the Horizon
  77. Can geocentrist theory still be possible?
  78. Can Earth's rotation reverse, like its magnetic polarity?
  79. Why is the Earth round?
  80. The De Laval Nozzle
  81. Why 23.5 degrees?
  82. What is Gravitational Collapse?
  83. Can Earth capture a second moon?

  84. How far does the Earth's gravity extend?
  85. How far is the Moon?
  86. Twinkle, twinkle little star
    How I wonder, what you are.
  87. Teaching about seasons
  88. Space Launches by Cannon--A
  89. Space Launches by Cannon--B
  90. The Southern Pole of the Sky
  91. Do Astrologers use Wrong Positions for Planets?
  92. Why does the Moon have bigger craters?
  93. Why does Gravity Exist?
  94. Atmospheric "Thermals"--Triggered by Electric Forces?
  95. What would happen if Earth rotated faster?
  96. Where do gravity of Earth and Sun balance?
  97. The Ultimate Astronomy Tool
  98. High Temperature in Cold Outer Space

  99.   Refraction of sunlight and starlight by the atmosphere
  100.   Advice to a would-be astronomer
  101.   The effect of the Color of Light on the Output of Solar Cells
  102.   What is "radiation"?
  103.   Height of the Atmosphere
  104.   How does the upper atmosphere get so hot?
  105.   History of the use of De Laval's nozzle on rockets
  106.   Why don't Space Rockets use Wings?
  107. Distance of horizon on Mars
  108. Stopping the rotation of Earth?
  109. The equation of a parabola
  110. When does Jewish Sabbath start in the far north?
  111. Where is the center of the global landmass?
  112. What if our Sun was a much hotter star?
  113. Finding the north direction

  114. Why not use a heat shield going up?
  115. When and where can rainbows be seen?
  116. The unusual rotation of the planet Venus
  117. Why not use nuclear power for spaceflight?
  118. "Doesn't heat rise?"
  119. "Have any changes been observed on the Moon?"
  120. Why isn't our atmosphere flung off by the Earth's rotation?
  121. Can kinetic energy be reconverted to work?
  122. Does any location get the same number of sunshine hours per year?
  123. Speed of toy car rolling off an inclined ramp
  124. Acceleration due to gravity

  125. Re-Entry from Space
  126. Balancing a Bicycle
  127. Is Absolute Zero reached on the Moon?
  128. Why isn't Longitude measured from 0° to 360°?
  129. "Constellation" or "Asterism"?
  130. "Position of the Stars when I was Born"
  131. Rotation of the Earth's Core"
  132. How hot is the Sun?
  133. How much weaker is gravity higher up?
  134. Eclipse of Venus?
  135. The Big Bang

  136. Thanks for the "Math Refresher" in Spanish
  137. The Pressure of Sunlight
  138. How is the instant the seasons change determined?
  139. Operation of Ion Rockets
  140. Physical Librations of the Moon
  141. The De-Laval Nozzle
  142. Why does the space shuttle rotate at take-off?
  143. Cold Fusion
  144. What if a Neutron Star hit the Sun?
    Why did the Moon appear Red?
  145. Centrifuge for Whirling Astronauts
  146. What Holds Galaxies Together?
  147. View of Earth and Moon from Mars
  148. Appearance of the Moon (1)
  149. Appearance of the Moon (2): Does it "roll around"?
  150. Altitude of the tail of the Big Dipper
  151. Sudden decompression, 5 miles up

  152. Do Negative Ions make you Feel Good?
  153. Shape of the Earth's Orbit
  154. Questions about the Solar Corona:
                       (1) Why don't its particles separate by weight?
                        (2) What accelerates the solar wind?
  155. Why does the rising Sun look so big?
  156. Drawing a Perpendicular Line in Rectangular Coordinates
  157. Unequal Seasons
  158. Is the Big Dipper visible from Viet Nam?
  159. Holes in a Solar Sail
  160. Consequences of no more solar X-rays
  161. Science Fair Project on the Size of the Earth
  162. Superposition of Waves
  163. The Sun and Seasons

If you have a relevant question of your own, you can send it to audavstern("at" symbol)erols.com
Before you do, though, please read the instructions


 

114.   Why not use a heat shield going up?

    The other day a colleague asked me a question that I could not answer and which keeps intriguing me. "We know that (the shield of) a spacecraft that re-enters the earth's atmosphere heats up spectacularly because it is hit and slowed down by air-molecules. Is there a similar problem when it is going the other way, at take off? It is going through the same amount of air and acceleration looks quite similar to deceleration, only the other way around." The only answer that I could think of is that a good part of the acceleration might take place at higher altitudes where there is less air, and braking is done only by using the atmosphere.

    Reply

    The reason you suggested yourself is pretty much what happens.

        Going up, it is the rocket engine which provides acceleration and energy. Because air resistance robs energy and is undesirable, the rocket deliberately rises vertically, to go though the denser atmosphere as quickly as possible. The vehicle gets most of its velocity, and almost all of the kinetic energy, at high altitudes where air density is too low to make a great difference. With the space shuttle "Columbia," even that might not have been enough: by the time it reached twice the velocity of sound, the atmosphere around it was still dense enough to rip a piece of foam insulation off its fuel tank, and it hit the orbiter with great force, breaking the heat shield.

        On coming down (with spacecraft which we want to come down undamaged), the atmosphere is the brake absorbing the energy. We need that air resistance, and the heating is a result of absorbed energy! The big concern that energy should not be absorbed too fast, otherwise the heat gets too intense and may melt the heat shield and everything else. That is why the space shuttle comes down at a low angle, trying to stay as long as possible in a layer with the right density: If the shuttle comes in too high, not enough energy is lost, if too low, too much. The density is also important in supporting the shuttle, which--like a kite--needs part of the resistance to help it from coming down too fast.

        A final note: heat shields get very hot, but most of the energy, almost all of it, is given to the shock which forms ahead of the heat shield. It thus heats the air, not the re-entering vehicle.

 

115.   When and where can rainbows be seen?

 

116.   The unusual rotation of the planet Venus

 

117.   Why not use nuclear power for spaceflight?

    Why not use nuclear energy to power spaceflight? After all, few pounds of plutonium contain as much energy as thousands of tons of rocket fuel!

    Reply

    Nice idea. However, to fly in space takes rocket thrust, not just energy.

        By Newton's laws, the forward momentum given to any rocket is always equal to the backward momentum given to the jet fired backwards. That momentum, in its turn, depends on two factors--how much mass is expelled by the jet, how many tons per second, and the speed with which it is expelled. Nuclear energy can supply the speed, but something must provide the expelled mass.

        You might think next that given some source of mass (say, a tank filled with water), plentiful nuclear energy would make it possible to eject it much faster. But how? Rocket engines work by converting heat into directed motion, in a very efficient way, but they already run about as hot as available materials can stand. Nuclear energy could provide more heat, but no rocket engine could stand it.

        Early in the space age a serious effort existed to build a nuclear rocket, getting its thrust by heating hydrogen with nuclear fission. A jet of hydrogen, coming from a rocket engine at a certain temperature, is much faster than a jet of burned rocket fuel, coming from a rocket engine at the same temperature. The reason is linked to the fact that hydrogen molecules are much lighter than those of any burned fuel.

        However, the rate at which rocket engines used in spaceflight supply energy is enormous--e.g. the shuttle's engines burn a ton of fuel or more each second. The stresses are enormous, and the risk of nuclear material and waste products of fission getting into the atmosphere was too great, and so the project ended.

        A visionary proposal of the 1950s proposed a "rocket" cabin with a strong flat plate on the bottom (oil would be sprayed on it for protection), and a trapdoor through which small nuclear bombs could be dropped, detonating some distance away and pushing the craft forward. On paper, it seemed feasible, but an actual nuclear test was deemed hazardous, sure to release contamination. The nuclear test-ban treaty of 1963 ended all efforts in this direction.
    -------------------------

        I should add here that a book has recently appeared about "Project Orion", by (what I take as) the son of Freeman Dyson, prime mover in that project: Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship George B. Dyson, George Dyson, David Sobel (Editor)

 

118.   "Doesn't heat rise?"

 

119.   Have any changes been observed on the Moon?

    I happened to wonder if anyone has looked at the moon in the last 100 years or so and noticed a crater that 'wasn't there yesterday'. How many new craters have been observed and how big are they? That could kind of say things about safety HERE! We do have frequent meteorites, after all. I have even seen one myself

    Reply

        I once had an office on the same floor as a lady scientist, Winnifred Cameron, who very much wanted to find such changes. She used a special viewing device looking at two pictures of a region on the Moon, taken under similar conditions but at different times, flipping from one to the other and looking to see if anything changed. I don't think anything ever did. She was particularly interested in observations of a Russian named Kozyrev, who claimed to see glows.

        As for impacts, it is only possible to see pretty big ones. If meteorite impacts are your interest, read the chapter "The Shoemaker Comets" in "First Light" by Richard Preston. It's a great book. Gene Shoemaker is unfortunately gone from us, killed in a head-on collision while rounding a blind curve in Australia's outback. Those roads are usually completely empty, but you never know fate.

 

120.   Why isn't our atmosphere flung off by the Earth's rotation?

        I have wondered for years how the earth keeps our atmosphere. The equator moves at almost 1000 MPH and the atmosphere is fluid. The fact that there isn't any wind (to speak of, at least resulting from the earth's rotation) says that the attraction of gravity is stronger than the centrifugal force trying to throw it off. Do we know if the amount of atmosphere is increasing, decreasing or remaining the same? It just seems to me that there should be a lot of turbulence in the atmosphere/space boundary region, although the 'emptiness' of space probably can't provide any drag on the atmosphere.

    Reply

    Concerning the atmosphere... the centrifugal force on the Earth's equator is just a fraction of 1% of gravity; it makes the Earth slightly oval, but nothing falls off. The effect was found in the 1600s, when pendulum clocks accurate in Europe slowed down near the equator. Jupiter is bigger and rotates faster--so its equatorial flattening is larger, large enough to be evident in photos through the telescope.

        If you went around Earth at orbital velocity--one circuit in 90 minutes--the centrifugal force would just balance gravity. Our rotation speed (one circuit in about 24 hours) is nowhere near that.

 

121.   Can kinetic energy be reconverted to work?

I read your article about energy from the following web site:

        http://www.phy6.org /stargaze/Senergy.htm

        and have a question. Is kinetic energy available to do work later?

    Reply

        It depends. Kinetic energy is all too easily converted to heat by friction, and if this is allowed to happen, that energy is rarely recoverable. However, if you can convert it to another form, you can extract at least some useful work from it (there is always some friction loss). Examples:

    1. You zoom on your bicycle down a valley and gain kinetic energy. That energy can help you rise again on the upslope on the other side. Rising against gravity is doing work.

    2. Your car has to stop at a red traffic light. If it is an ordinary car, you press the brake pedal, which pushes brake pads against wheel disks or drums. Friction converts the kinetic energy into heating of the disks or drums, but you can hardly convert that to work.

          If however your car is of the new "hybrid" type with electric motors on the wheels (like the Toyota "Prius" or the Honda hybrid), by braking you connect the motors to the car's batteries. The motors act as generators and charge the batteries, turning your kinetic energy into chemical energy of the battery, which can be reused.

    3. The space shuttle in orbit has a tremendous kinetic energy. Upon re-entry, its orbit is nudged into the atmosphere, the shuttle turns so the underside of its wings (covered with heat tiles) faces forward, and air resistance, helped by a shock, converts the energy into heating the air. Not much can be done with that.

          If however you link the shuttle to a conducting tether, as was done once (with some problems), the motion of the tether across the Earth's magnetic field lines creates a voltage, which may be tapped, e.g. for charging batteries. See http://www.phy6.org/Education/wtether.html.

    4. Accelerators of high-energy particles used to depend on pulsed magnets. I remember visiting one such accelerator around 1960, the "Cosmotron" in Brookhaven, Long Island. Its magnet needed a large electric current, which created a great amount of magnetic energy. It made little sense to waste that energy every time the magnetic field was allowed to decay.

          The solution was a large flywheel, connected to the generator providing the current. When the current decreased, the generator acted as a motor (a bit like that of the hybrid car) and spun up a flywheel weighing a few tons. The next cycle, the flywheel provided most of the energy for generating the magnet's current, slowing down again; only a little extra power was needed to make good friction losses. Thus the energy bounced back and forth between magnetic and kinetic.

          Someone pointed out to me that the way the flywheel rotated was carefully chosen. In case the flywheel's bearings somehow gave way, its rotation was such that it would roll through the wall of the building and out into the field--not in the opposite direction, which would have brought it into the crowded accelerator hall.

          I hope you get the idea by now.

 

122.   Does any location get the same number of sunshine hours per year?

 

123.   Speed of toy car rolling off an inclined ramp

    This is my first time doing this. I am eleven years old and I have a science project that I need some help on. My dad built me a ramp for model cars. I want to prove that the speed of a car is determined by the weight of a car. I think that the lighter the car the faster it will go down the ramp. How do I prove this? Is there a formula? Please help me.

    Reply

    You are up against something very fundamental, something I hope you will remember in high school, when you study physics.

        Every object has a WEIGHT, the force by which gravity pulls it down. A big stone has more weight than a small one. Weight is one way of measuring the amount of material in the stone, or its "mass." A big stone has much more mass than a small one.

        However, if you drop them together, you will find that they fall equally fast!! This is, because each object also resists motion, and the resistance (called "inertia") is ALSO proportional to mass. That is why on a horizontal surface it takes much more force to get a bowling ball rolling than a tennis ball. The motion is horizontal, gravity is not too much involved, but the bowling ball has more mass and therefore much more resistance to being set in motion.

        Say the big stone has 10 times the mass of the small one. It also has 10 times the inertia, and that inertia does not allow it to move any faster, even when the Earth pulls it down 10 times as strongly.

        Model cars on a ramp (I suppose they are moved by gravity, like soap-box racers) obey the same rules. A heavy car is pulled more strongly, but also has more inertia, so the two should roll at the same speed. Try it! Put two toy cars--big and small--together on a slanting board, and let go. All other things being equal, they should move together.

        To make the car roll faster, the only thing you can do is reduce friction (and at very high speed, air resistance). A car with well-oiled axles may move faster. Try it!

 

124.   Acceleration due to gravity

    I am a high school physics student. My class was given a bonus assignment for the internet and I have yet to find an answer. I was wondering if you could help. I know that the acceleration due to gravity on the earth is ~ 9.8 m/sec^2, but the class was asked to find a website that listed values of acceleration due to gravity at different locations on the Earth including acceleration due to gravity at our high school, Clarion-Limestone High School in Strattanville, PA. My question is:

        What are values of acceleration due to gravity at different locations on Earth and what is the value closest to my school?

        If you could help me out because I am really interested in finding out the answer, I would be greatly appreciative.

    Reply

    Have you just tried to ask Google or Yahoo for links concerned with "Acceleration of Free Fall"? I did so and got many leads

        I am not really supposed to do your work--but look at http://www.haverford.edu/educ/knight-booklet/accelarator.htm Actually, the interesting questions are not "what is the number" but "why does gravity vary from place to place?" and "how do we know?"

        It varies because the Earth rotates, adding a centrifugal force to the forces felt locally. That does two things: it makes the Earth bulge at the equator, so that points there are more distant from the center of Earth. And it adds there a force opposing gravity, so that the acceleration is smaller. Newton proposed that around 1690.

        The process was experimentally studied by comparing the time kept by pendulum clocks ("grandfather clocks") at different locations. The period of the pendulum depends on gravity, and a clock which keeps correct time in Pennsylvania will probably run slow at the equator.

    Response

    Thank you for the additional information on gravity. I actually did look at Google acceleration due to gravity but I guess I didn't look fully enough.

        You actually were a great help for me. You explained the subject better than my teacher. I hope you continue this because physics and other sciences really interest me.

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Author and Curator:   Dr. David P. Stern
     Mail to Dr.Stern:   audavstern("at" symbol)erols.com .

Last updated 9-17-2004