We had a very interesting lecture from Simon Reynolds, who is the Science Learning Manager at the Dundee Science Centre. I cannot pretend to know much about space. Yes I knew it was vast, but just how vast, I had no clue. Having engaged with Dr Simon Reynold’s input on space, I now have a better idea of just how big space is. Also, I have begun to realise just how crucial maths is to Science, and in particular Astronomy.
When Astronomers describe how many stars there are the universe, it is usually written as 1022 stars (Reynolds, 2015). It is because space is so large, that numbers used in space are large also. For example, If you were to write this number out it would look like, 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. It’s a massive number isn’t it? These equations are an aspect of maths which astronomers have to solve daily, with extremely large numbers.
We also looked into the different planets in regards to spacing and size. The moon itself is approximately 384, 400 km from Earth, and the sun is 146 million km from the Earth. There is not only the planets to consider, but also the fact that space is huge, and is filled with big empty gaps between each planet. However, if you look at the image below, we seem to be relatively close to our neighbouring planets. But as the numbers prove, this is in fact not the case.
We then discussed how big we think particular planets are by comparing them to objects such as beach balls, footballs etc. Of course the scale that this provided was not correct, but it gave an impression of the different sizes of the planets.
The image provided provides a more realistic interpretation of the size of our solar system, as it compares each individual planet to each other. This diagram is much more realistic than the objects, as the size of the sun is represented in a way that illustrates the vastness of our solar system. I have found that it is difficult to explain just how vast the universe is without some visual aid. Oh and did I forget to mention, my friend’s Godfather is the astronaut Tim Peake. Is that cool or what?
References
Reynolds, S. (2015) ‘Maths in Astronomy’ [PowerPoint presentation]ED21006:Discovering Mathematics. Available at: https://my.dundee.ac.uk/bbcswebdav/pid-4535880-dt-content-rid-2953578_2/courses/ED21006_SEM0000_1516/Simon%20Reynolds%20Maths%20and%20astronomy%20presentaion.pdf (Accessed: 19 November 2015).
