Earth And The Solar System
Solar System There are so many different things that apply to our universe that no one seems to mention very much. The other day I wrote an article about how time is slowing down. It is very slight, but many scientists believe that it is happening. Today I want to mention the fact the the distance between the planets is shrinking. This is also slight, but it is taking place. It is being caused by the loss of orbital energy to gravitational waves, because every time a planet has to plow through one of these waves on its trip around the sun, it is slowed down very slightly. There is another consequence to this, the planets are getting closer to the sun. Don't worry though, the planets will never get a chance to fall into the sun, so you don't have to worry about that and even if they did, that would be many billions of years into the future. The reason that the planets won't fall into the sun eventually, is that before that can happen, the sun will expand and become a red giant and we can expect to lose Mercury and Venus to this event. It is said that the Earth might even be burned to a cinder as the sun expands closer, but some scientists say this will not happen, because the expansion of the sun will blow the Earth into a more distant orbit. Did you know that some scientists believe that the Earth is not as old as it is said to be? The reason for that is that they believe that if the Earth was 4.5 billion years old, it would have been covered with space dust by now. Some scientists are looking to the moon to determine the age of the Earth, because they believe that the moon has been around at least almost as long. They are calculating the amount of dust on the moon as a gauge One estimate is that the moon is receiving 14 million tons of dust from space every year. When satellites were used to determine the amount of dust it was far less being estimated at about 25,000 tons per year. This amount was verified by the amount of space dust trapped in rocks on Earth. According to the findings the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. Here is what I do not understand. The Earth and the moon are not equal. Oh they are both bodies of the solar system and the moon does revolve around the Earth, but if the moon has no atmosphere and the Earth we know does, would some of this so called space dust have burned up entering the Earth's atmosphere, and thus we would have less dust per mile on the Earth than on the moon? Another thing to take into consideration is that while some meteors hit the Earth and become meteorites, they burn up and break up and thus the dust dispersion may be different from the ones that just impact the moon. I am not sure that comparing the dust fall on the Moon is a accurate way to measure the dust fall on the Earth and thus make age predictions about it.
Space The Earth is said to be a certain size and thus its mass is also said to be a certain size, but the mass of the Earth is steadily increasing and this means that so is its gravity. It is a very small change, but it does seem to be happening. The gravity on Earth isn't even the same from place to place on the planet, contrary to what most people think. Gravity varies with latitude. Why is this? In a nutshell, the Earth is not a perfect sphere. The rotation of the Earth has the effect of making the Earth sort of a flattened sphere. The diameter at the equator is a little over 25 miles greater than the diameter taken from pole to pole. This causes gravity to be slightly less at the equator than at the poles. As we look out into the heavens we see what looks like a steady picture of stars and galaxies remaining completely still. We never notice any change in their positions from the day we are born to the day we die, yet all that is an illusion. The galaxies are racing away from each other almost at the speed of light, at least that is what we think today. Their speed is measured by something called the redshift and this is dependent on color. The more red the light appears to be coming from an object, the faster it is said to be flying away from us. I won't go into details here, but several objects have been found in space that we know are not moving that fast, yet they also show light shifted to the red, why? It is not known yet and it does certainly cast some doubt on this system. It is not a question that the galaxies are moving away from each other, it is a question of how fast they are traveling and it just might turn out that they are either going much slower or something is happening that Einstein said was impossible, they are traveling faster than the speed of light. Two really hot planets in our solar system are Jupiter and Saturn. Jupiter is so hot that it radiates far more heat than it absorbs from the sun. It is said to be at least two times as much. Yet these two planets are cooling down, very very slowly cooling down. Since Jupiter is so active, some people have asked the question, what will happen to Jupiter when our sun ceases to function? There are a couple of different answers to this question, which shows that no one is entirely sure. One answer is that since Jupiter puts out so much radiation, it will become the most radiant body in what is left of our solar system. Not everyone agrees with this assessment however. Some think that Jupiter's internal energy will be gone by that time and it will freeze solid. My personal opinion is that this is dependent on so many other factors. The expanding sun may have some as yet unknown effect on Jupiter that will alter it. For all we know there might even be some chance of it exploding under some precise set of circumstances. The way our solar system works is still a bit of a puzzle to scientists. The outer regions of the solar system do not seem to perform correctly. This could all be explained however, if there was a large unknown world beyond the orbit of Pluto, which is not always the most distant planet (I refuse to say it is not a planet) because sometimes Neptune is further out. If there was another planet out there, it would have to be much bigger than Pluto and this would explain the features of the Kuiper Belt. Scientists have been looking for a planet X for many years now. Here is the funny thing about it, under new planet definitions, it would not be classified as a planet at all. The orbits in the Kuiper Belt are highly irregular and it is felt that a very large body would be needed to explain this. Scientists have calculated that a body that is somewhere between 30 to 70 percent the size of Earth would explain these odd orbits. All this really begs the question, how far out does our solar system really go and could there be even more than one large body out there? |
