Astro Trivia
Here is a collection of astro trivia. There's no rhyme or reason to it. It's just stuff that has caught my eye. Some quirky, funny, interesting or just weird bits and bobs.
The Universe Smells of Booze
In 2009, astronomers exploring a giant cloud of gas and dust at the centre of the Milky Way made a surprise discovery.
The cloud was packed full of a chemical known as ethyl formate, which has a couple of intriguing properties.
It is responsible for giving raspberries their flavour, and has the smell of rum.
Another nearby region is full of ethyl alcohol, or ethanol, the type we use to make alcoholic beverages.
It contains enough alcohol to supply everyone on Earth with 300,000 pints of beer per day for a billion years!
If bottled at source, the proof for this beer would be low, with an alcohol content of less than 1%.
But as the cloud also contains plenty of other nasty chemicals, among them carbon monoxide and hydrogen cyanide, it would still leave you with quite a headache the next morning.
(This story was sourced from the excellent BBC Sky at Night.)
Esteemed astronomer Tycho Brahe's nose was metal
The great Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe was one of the more colourful characters in the history of astronomy.
He was a bit feisty and as a student he got into an argument with another student that ended up in a duel. According to reports at the time, “The combination of two hot-blooded young men, heavy drinking and the universal carriage of swords made violence inevitable.” Tycho had part of his nose cut off in the duel. Being a resourceful kind of guy, he made a replacement nose out of gold, silver and wax.
Big Bang Theory (You're having a laugh)
Most people are familiar with the term 'Big Bang' theory (and not just from show). However, when astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle first coined the phrase 'Big Bang' he did so in order to mock the theory. Hoyle was a firm believer in the alternative steady state theory which gives the universe no start or end. However the name stuck and the term Big Bang is now widely used although the irony has been lost.
OMG, a floater
Saturn has the smallest density of all the planets in the solar system. It is so light it could float on water.
You're joking. Please tell me you're joking!
Scientists in Cambridge spent 3 years calculating one of the fundamental keys to the universe - The Hubble Constant that determines the age of the universe.
This process mirrored a passage in the cult science fiction novel and radio series 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' in which an alien race programs a computer called Deep Thought to provide the ultimate answer to understanding life and the universe.
In the novel, seven and a half million years later, Deep Thought comes back with the result, 42.
In an extraordinary coincidence when the Cambridge scientists finally calculated the Hubble Constant they found the answer was also 42. To be fair the scientists took it on the chin, as Dr Keith Grange explained, 'It caused quite a few laughs when we arrived at the figure 42, because we're all great fans of The Hitchhiker's Guide'
Just to complete the cycle, the author Douglas Adams was born in ...... Cambridge.
What is it with authors!!
Here is a section from the novel Gulliver's Travels written by Jonathan Swift in 1726:
They [the Laputians] have likewise discovered two lesser stars, or satellites, which revolve about Mars, whereof the innermost is distant from the center of the primary planet exactly three of its diameters, and the outermost five; the former revolves in the space of ten hours, and the latter in twenty-one and a half; so that the squares of their periodical times are very near the same proportion with the cubes of their distance from the center of Mars, which evidently shows them to be governed by the same law of gravitation that influences the other heavenly bodies.
Jonathan Swift described the two moons of Mars even though they were not discovered until over 150 years later. For the record he described Phobos' orbital period as 10 hours (very close to the real figure of 7.6) and Deimos' as 21.5 (close to the real 30.2). That's just nuts!!
One Heavy Dude
A neutron star's density is mind-boggling. These stars are composed almost entirely of neutrons packed together in a tiny radius.
Just a teaspoon of neutron star would weigh over a trillion kilograms. That's more than the weight of the entire human population (which reaches a few hundred billion kilograms).
To make something as dense as a neutron star, the whole of humanity would need to be crammed into a space the size of a sugar cube.
(This story was sourced from the excellent BBC Sky at Night.)
No sun tan lotion required
Pluto is situated so far out in the depths of the solar system that if you were to stand on its surface the sun would just look like a bright star.
Big Bang or Bird Poo?
In 1965 Robert Dicke of Princetown University was investigating the theory of Big Bang and was pursuing the idea that a residue of the big bang would take the form of low level background radiation that should still be detectable today.
Meanwhile, not a million miles away in New Jersey two scientists, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, were trying to get to the bottom of a problem they were having with a radio telescope.
They were trying to use the giant dish to listen to radio waves coming from deep space. Unfortunately they kept picking up an annoying buzz that was hampering their research. They had tried replacing different parts of the operating equipment but couldn't cure the problem.
They decided the culprits were probably a couple of nesting pigeons who had been leaving their own 'messages' on the telescope's dish. So Penzias and Wilson climbed up on to the dish with a couple of brooms and scrubbed the offending poo off the surface. Still no luck.
In desperation they phoned Princetown University for advice and got through to Robert Dicke. As soon as they described the problem Dicke realized that the background buzz was exactly what he had been looking for. It wasn't caused by bird poo, it was the distant echo of a very large bang that occurred at the dawn of time.