MY MONEY IS ON THE EXPERT ON BLACK HOLES STEVEN HAWKINGS

To say that the idea of black holes is complicated is an understatment. Even the great Steven Hawking changed his mind on the subject. Here are some nice pictures on what a Black Hole might look like- (Sandi has the best Picture on here blog, check it out.)




In an artical in news @ nature. com back in 2004, The eminent physicist Stephen Hawking has conceded that information can escape from black holes after all. The idea has been gaining popularity with physicists for some time, but the fact that Hawking, a pioneer of black-hole theory in the 1970s, has finally accepted it is something of a watershed.

Hawking had believed that anything swallowed by a black hole was forever hidden from the outside universe. A freind of Hawking- John Preskill bet that the information carried by an object was not destroyed when it plummeted into a collapsed star, and could actually be recovered.

Hawking's original view follows Einstein's general theory of relativity, which predicts that, at certain locations in space, matter collapses into an infinitely small and dense point, called a singularity. The theory says that the force of gravity at this point is so great that nothing, not even light itself, can escape, hence the term 'black hole'.



Because the singularity is infinitely small, it cannot possibly have any structure and so there is no way that it can hold information. Any data about particles entering the black hole must be lost forever.

The problem is that quantum theory, which describes space and matter on very tiny scales, contradicts this. Quantum theory says any process can be run in reverse, so starting conditions can theoretically be inferred from the end products alone. This implies that a black hole must somehow store information about the items that fell into it.

So an object falling into a black hole is not completely obliterated. Instead, the black hole is altered as it absorbs the object. Although it would certainly be very difficult to retrieve any information about that object, the data are still there, somewhere inside the black hole.
How could that information ever escape? The answer lies in one of Hawking's greatest discoveries: that black holes slowly evaporate into space by losing particles from the very edge of the gravitational precipice at their rim, called Hawking radiation. The black hole eventually shrinks to a tiny kernel, at which point a growing torrent of radiation begins to leak out, potentially carrying the lost information with it.

SUNDIAL ACTIVITIES

HERE ARE SOME GREAT SITES FOR SOME FUN ACTIVIES ON SUNDIALS - http://www.fi.edu/time/Journey/Sundials/interactsd.htm http://www.bbc.co.uk/norfolk/kids/summer_activities/make_sundial.shtml
THESE SITES HAVE CROSSWORD PUZZLES & GAMES THAT KIDS MIGHT ENJOY.

I found some interesting information on sundials that helps me have a better appreciation for this instrument - here are some nice pictures & some details on how a sundail works.



This is a Sundial for Mars - very cool!!!


As the earth turns on its axis, the sun appears to move across the sky. The shadows the sun casts move in a clockwise direction for objects in the northern hemisphere. If the sun rose and set at the same time and spot on the horizon each day shadow sticks would have been accurate clocks. However, the earth is always spinning like a top. It spins around an imaginary line called its axis. The axis runs through the center of the earth from the North Pole to the South Pole. The earth's axis is always tilted at the same angle.
Every 24 hours the earth makes one complete turn, or rotation. The earth rotates on its axis from west to east. The earth's rotation causes day and night. As the earth rotates, the night side will move into the sunlight, and the day side will move into the dark.
On the earth's yearly trip around the sun the North Pole is tilted toward the sun for six months and away from the sun for six months. This means the shadows cast by the sun change from day to day.
Because the earth is round, or curved, the ground at the base of a shadow stick will not be at the same angle to the sun's rays as at the equator. Because of this the shadow of the shadow stick will not move at a uniform rate during the day.
Eventually man discovered that angling the gnomon and aiming it north made a more accurate sundial. Because its angle makes up for the tilt of the Earth, the hour marks remained the same all year long. This type of gnomon is called a style. After this discovery, people were able to construct sundials that were much better at keeping accurate time.

BUMBLE BALL MANIA!

One of the more interesting experiments we did in class is when we used a bumble ball to model the random walk of photons in the Sun. I can see how the bumble ball experiment can give my students a hands look at how electrons scatter. Also, In the experiment we wanted to know how the photons get from the Sun's core and "escape" as light.

Once we got some good data went into the lab and did the computer simulation. The simulation was excellent because I see how the data came to life. An interesting note in class was the fact that a Sun’s photon only travels one centimeter before it gets remittedd in a process called "random walk".
After this experiment I was interested in knowing more about the photosphere - I found some great photos that I think may give my students a better understand of this concept.

The photosphere is lowest layer of the atmosphere. This zone emits the light that we see. The photosphere is about 300 miles (500 kilometers) thick. But most of the light that we see comes from its lowest part, which is only about 100 miles (150 kilometers) thick. Astronomers often refer to this part as the sun's surface. At the bottom of the photosphere, the temperature is 6400 K, while it is 4400 K at the top.

The photosphere consists of numerous granules, which are the tops of granulation cells. A typical granule exists for 15 to 20 minutes. The average density of the photosphere is less than one-millionth of a gram per cubic centimeter. This may seem to be an extremely low density, but there are tens of trillions to hundreds of trillions of individual particles in each cubic centimeter.




A Moreton wave, a type of surface wave caused by a sudden release of energy by the sun, spreads across the solar surface in a series of four images. This wave front traveled at about 186 miles (300 kilometers) per second.


The surface of the sun is marked by many small patches of gas called granules, which are believed to be produced by the violent churning of gases in the sun's interior.


A rapidly expanding solar quake, which resembles an Earthquake, is shown in a series of images of the sun's surface. This quake spread out across the surface more than 62,150 miles (100,000 kilometers).

NEWS FLASH!! FROM SPACE & BEYOND

This new NASA Hubble Space Telescope image of the Antennae galaxies is the sharpest yet of this merging pair of galaxies. During the course of the collision, billions of stars will be formed. The brightest and most compact of these star birth regions are called super star clusters.
The two spiral galaxies started to interact a few hundred million years ago, making the Antennae galaxies one of the nearest and youngest examples of a pair of colliding galaxies. Nearly half of the faint objects in the Antennae image are young clusters containing tens of thousands of stars. The orange blobs to the left and right of image center are the two cores of the original galaxies and consist mainly of old stars criss-crossed by filaments of dust, which appears brown in the image. The two galaxies are dotted with brilliant blue star-forming regions surrounded by glowing hydrogen gas, appearing in the image in pink.
The new image allows astronomers to better distinguish between the stars and super star clusters created in the collision of two spiral galaxies. By age dating the clusters in the image, astronomers find that only about 10 percent of the newly formed super star clusters in the Antennae will survive beyond the first 10 million years. The vast majority of the super star clusters formed during this interaction will disperse, with the individual stars becoming part of the smooth background of the galaxy. It is however believed that about a hundred of the most massive clusters will survive to form regular globular clusters, similar to the globular clusters found in our own Milky Way galaxy.
The Antennae galaxies take their name from the long antenna-like "arms" extending far out from the nuclei of the two galaxies, best seen by ground-based telescopes. These "tidal tails" were formed during the initial encounter of the galaxies some 200 to 300 million years ago. They give us a preview of what may happen when our Milky Way galaxy will collide with the neighboring Andromeda galaxy in several billion years.

"LOOK IT'S GRUS - THE CRANE - WHAT CRANE? "

October Constellations
The October sky contains seven constellations, including such well-known formations as Aquarius, the water bearer, and Pegasus, the winged horse. The only notable deep sky objects are located in these two constellations. Aquarius contains two globular clusters and one open cluster. Pegasus is home to a single globular star cluster. The remaining constellations of October are relatively unremarkable, composed mainly of faint stars with no deep sky objects worthy of mention. The only bright stars worth mentioning are Alnair, in Grus, and Fomalhaut, in Piscis Austrinus.

Grus
The Crane

Pronunciation: (GRUS) 
Abbreviation: Gru Genitive: Gruis
Right Ascension: 22.61 hours Declination: -44.52 degrees Area in Square Degrees: 366
Crosses Meridian: 9 PM, October 10
Grus, the Crane, is visible in latitudes south of 33 degrees north from July through September. It was named by Johann Bayer and represents the crane, which was the symbol for the office of astronomer in ancient Egypt.

Mythology of the constellation Grus
During the late 1590's, two Dutch navigators, Pieter Keyser and Frederick de Houtman, mapped several new constellations as they traveled south, the majority being named after recently identified birds and animals. A few years later Johann Bayer, the German astronomer, included these new star patterns in his Uranometria, published in 1603



Alnair
The Bright
Alnair means 'The Bright One', and its magnitude of +1.7 certainly makes this variable blue star the brightest in its home constellation of Grus, the Crane.

A constellation of the southern sky, lying immediately south of the bright star Fomalhaut. Important features are the hot blue star Alnair, and the easily distinguished double star of Delta Gruis.

Alnair, brightest of the stars that make up Grus the Crane, is just over one hundred light years from the Solar System.
Al Na'ir is a blue B7IV sub giant about 3 times the diameter of the sun and about 170 times as luminous.

Distance (Light Years) 101 ± 3
Visual Magnitude 1.73
Color (B-V) -0.13

Alnair (Alpha Gruis)

The brightest star in the constellation Grus and the thirtieth brightest star in the sky. Its Arabic name (also written “Al Na’ir”) means “the bright one,” and comes from a longer phrase for “the bright one in the fish’s tail,” since the Arabs considered the stars of Grus to be the tail of Piscis Austrinus. Alnair can't be seen from latitudes higher than 42° N.

Visual magnitude 1.73
Absolute magnitude -0.74
Spectral type B7IV
Surface temperature 13,500 K
Luminosity 380 Lsun
Distance 101 light-years
Position R.A. 22h 8m 14s, Dec. -46° 57' 40"

In astronomy, stellar classification is a classification of stars based initially on photospheric temperature and its associated spectral characteristics, and subsequently refined in terms of other characteristics. Stellar temperatures can be classified by using Wien's displacement law; but this poses difficulties for distant stars.

"DAD, WHY AM I DOING THIS ?"

My daughter Maya was not sure what I was doing but I promised here a stawberry sunday if she held still. The picture does not show the concept of umbra & penumbra but here is a definition that might help. ( note, blog would not let me download some nice animations that gave some examples of these concepts - please advise)
Umbra and penumbra from an extended source. You may have noticed that shadows are often fuzzy, particularly when the surface on which the shadow lies is far from the object casting the shadow. This fuzziness is because no light source is only a point in space. All sources have some geometrical size. Thus, light from one edge of the source is not quite parallel to light from the other edge.
The evenly dark part of a shadow is called the umbra. The fuzzy part between the dark and the light is called the penumbra.
If one is in the umbra of an object, the light source is completely obscured. If one is in the penumbra, the source is only partially obscured, to a greater or lesser degree as one moves through the penumbra.
The umbra of a shadow is not absolutely black because there is always scattered light that makes its way into it. In the case of sunlight, the scattered light is mostly bluish skylight, so shadows are bluer than normal.

"TEACHER, WHAT IS THE LITTLE YELLOW DOT ?"

MY STUDENTS WERE FACINATIATED WITH HOW THIS 1.4 MILLION KM SUN WAS NOW A 2-3 MM IMAGE BEHIND THE VIEW FINDER.
I HAD A HARD TIME WITH MATH AT FIRST - BUT I THINK I HAVE SOME NUMBERS I CAN USE IN CLASS. THE PICTURE SHOWS SOME OF MY STUDENTS VIEWING THE SUN WITHOUT THE RULER TO MEASURE THE DISTANCE FROM THEMSELVES TO THE IMAGE. THEY HAD A DIFFICULT TIME WITH THE RULER - THEY KEPT HITTING THEMSELVES IN THE THROAT.
HERE ARE SOME MORE FUN FACTS ABOUT THE SUN FOR MY STUDENTS.
Diameter: 1,390,000 km.
Mass: 1.989e30 kg
Temperature: 5800 K (surface)
15,600,000 K (core)

HERE COMES THE SUN

ON A SUNNY SUNDAY AFTERNOON I HAD THE OPPORTUNITY TO EXPERIMENT WITH MY COMPASS. IN THE TWO PICS YOU CAN SEE HOW WE ARE AT A 40 TO 45 DEGREE LAT. ONE LINE IS AT THE NOON LINE WHILE THE COMPASS LINE IS SHOWING THE MAGNETIC NORTH. COOL!

THIS IS TEST

MORE LATER -