The universe is made of dander
Episode 31 · Audio file · December 2nd, 2016 · 1 hr 1 min
What's outside our solar system?
- Where does the solar system end? (ABC, Australia)
- Where in the universe is Voyager? The surprising showdown over where our solar system ends (TIME)
- What defines the boundary of the solar system? (NASA)
- Live tracking: Where are the Voyager probes now? (NASA)
- Voyager 1 is travelling at ~17 km/second (Wikipedia)
- It's believed that Voyager 1 is either in interstellar space or pretty close to it (the heliopause) - that's the furthest we've sent anything (Wikipedia)
- In about 30,000 years, Voyager 1 will have passed through the Oort Cloud & in 40,000 years it will pass within 1.6 light-years of the star Gliese 445 (Wikipedia)
- The infamous 'pale blue dot': Earth as seen by Voyager 1 from 6 billion km (Wikipedia)
- What is the heliopause? (Encyclopaedia Britannica)
- What is the heliopause? (Southwest Research Institute)
- The heliosphere: A proper sciencey paper (Max-Planck-Institut für Aeronomie)
- What is the Kuiper Belt? A belt of icy bodies beyond Neptune (Cosmos, Swinburne University)
- What is the Oort Cloud? A hypothesised belt of icy bodies in the far reaches of the solar system (Cosmos, Swinburne University)
- Voyager 1 & 2 spacecraft flight paths (The Planets Today, Vimeo)
- Could the Voyager, Pioneer & New Horizons probes eventually be caught by the gravity of another star & start orbiting that star? (Quora)
- What is a galaxy? (NASA)
- Galaxies & how they're formed (NASA)
- The Milky Way galaxy (NASA)
- Hubble’s high-definition panoramic view of the Andromeda galaxy (NASA)
- All about the Andromeda galaxy (EarthSky)
- Elliptical galaxy facts & definition (Space.com)
- Spiral galaxy facts & definition (Space.com)
- Estimates on how many solar systems & galaxies there might be in the universe (University of Cambridge)
- How many solar systems are in our galaxy? (NASA)
- Do all stars have solar systems? (Dept. of Physics, University of Illinois)
- How did our solar system form? (HubbleSite)
- Are we really all made of stardust? Yep (Phys.org)
- How are stars formed? (Science, How Stuff Works)
- Population I stars (younger) tend to be in the discs of spiral galaxies & made of heavier elements (Hyperphysics, Georgia State University)
- Population II stars (older) tend to be in globular clusters & the nucleus of galaxies & made of lighter elements (Hyperphysics, Georgia State University)
- Main sequence stars on the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram (Hyperphysics, Georgia State University)
- Interactive Hertzsprung-Russell diagram (Las Cumbres Observatory)
- Black holes come in 3 varieties: Stellar, supermassive & intermediate (Space.com)
- Into a black hole: A lecture transcript from Prof. Hawking (Stephen Hawking)
- Journey into a black hole (HubbleSite)
- The escape velocity for Earth is ~25,000 miles/hour or 40,000 km/hour (Wolfram Alpha)
- A list of escape velocities for the planets, moons, sun & solar system (Wikipedia)
- A list of the gravity values for all the planets compared with Earth (NASA)
- Definition of massive: "Having relatively high mass" (The Free Dictionary)
- How do black holes work? (Science, How Stuff Works)
- Black hole jets can influence star formation in galaxies by dispersing & heating interstellar gas (Phys.org)
- What happens when 2 black holes collide? You get gravitational waves like the one LIGO detected in 2015 (LIGO)
- Exoplanets are planets outside our solar system (Space.com)
- How long does it take for a star to ignite at birth? Not long, but the first photons of light may not escape for thousands of years (Reddit)
- First sun, then planets: The formation & evolution of the solar system (Wikipedia)
- Solar system formation (Windows 2 the Universe)
- What's the difference between comets & asteroids? (EarthSky)
- What is an orbit? (NASA)
- A list of solar system objects by orbit (Wikipedia)
- There are >8,000 artifical objects orbiting Earth (National Geographic)
- How can one say that gravity is a very weak force, when all the planets & stars are rotating around due to gravity only? (Quora)
- How can galaxies collide if the universe is expanding? (ABC, Australia)
- What is a galaxy cluster? A group of hundreds to thousands of galaxies, believed to be the largest gravitationally-bound structures in the universe (Wikipedia)
- What fuel does Voyager 1 use? (Slate)
- Live tracking: Where is Halley's comet now? (The Sky Live)
- What is Halley's comet (& its tail) made of? (Wikipedia)
- Halley's comet completes an elliptical orbit around the sun every ~76 years (Wikipedia)
- The difference between meteoroids, meteors & meteorites (Meteorites Australia)
- What causes a shooting star? (Wonderopolis)
- How do you shield astronauts & satellites from deadly micrometeorites? (Smithsonian)
Where are you from? Send us a postcard! Strange Attractor, c/ PO Box 9, Fitzroy, VIC 3065, Australia
Corrections
- Johnny meant 'elliptical' galaxies, not globular (Cosmos, Swinburne University)
- A globular cluster is a spherical collection of stars that orbits a galactic core as a satellite (Wikipedia)
- To go into orbit, a body must still reach escape velocity, but it must be directed away from a planet & then it follows a curved path (Wikipedia)