Where do you live Your home or your school has an address a street a city or town and a country When someone sends you a letter they write your address so that your mail carrier knows the letter should go to you For example the address of Brookside School is ID: 269330
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Slide1
What is your “cosmic” address?
Where do you live? Your home or your school has an address: a street, a city or town, and a country. When someone
sends you a letter, they write your address, so that your mail carrier knows the letter should go to you. For example, the address of Brookside School is: 100 Brookside Ave.Allendale, NJ 07401What is your address? Does this address really describe where you are? Imagine extending the address out to bigger and bigger divisions, until it becomes a "cosmic address" that includes your continent, planet, galaxy, and universe. Try writing yours!Slide2
Brookside School’s Cosmic Address:
100 Brookside Ave.
Allendale, NJ 07401United States of AmericaNorth AmericaEarthThe Solar System Orion Arm The Milky Way Galaxy Local Group of Galaxies Local
Supercluster
of Galaxies
(aka Virgo
Supercluster) The Universe How did you do?Slide3
The last step of the cosmic address is the largest division: the
Universe
. The universe is actually everything and everywhere. Every star and every galaxy we see is part of the same universe.
The
universe is a really big place!
How
big is the universe? Slide4
Allendale is just over 8 square kilometers (about 3 square miles)Slide5
New Jersey is about 743 km long.Slide6
It’s about 4,764 km from
New York to San FranciscoSlide7
Earth’s diameter is about 12, 742 kmSlide8
The sun is about 150,000,000 km from Earth. Now distances are so big that kilometers are not that useful.Slide9
The solar system is thought to be about 200,000 AUs in diameter. Slide10
Beyond our solar system, distances are so great that AUs are not that useful.
1 light year is approximately 9.5 trillion kilometers.Slide11
For measuring between stars and galaxies, we use light years:Slide12
Astronomers often use an even BIGGER distance: the parsec
1 parsec (pc) = 3.26 lightyears (ly)(One parsec is the distance corresponding to a parallax of one arc second.)
one arc second = 1/3600 degrees of a circleSlide13Slide14
Time out: What is Parallax?Slide15
Figure it out:
Does parallax increase or decrease with distance?Slide16
Back to the size of the Universe:
The Local Group is about 10 million light years across.Slide17
The Virgo Supercluster is about 200 million light years across!Slide18
The entire Universe is thought to be 160 BILLION light years across!
(but we don’t really know….)
(The observable universe is about 93 billion light years across.)scaleofuniverse.comSlide19
Check out this website:
Scaleofuniverse.comSlide20
Distances in Space 3/18/13
How do we measure distances in space?Astronomical Unit (AU)
Light year
Space is so VAST, that we need to use special units.
The average distance between the earth and the sun
= 149.6 million kilometers (150 million km)
Used to measure distances within our solar system (or within another star system)The distance light travels in one year
= 9.5 trillion kilometers
Used to measure distances beyond our solar system