Episode 4.notebook April 08, 2014 Episode 4: A Sky Full of Ghosts... The first person to realize that the stars were images from the past was William Herschel. It takes time for light to travel long distances, so the stars that are further away are further into the past. Sunrise is an illusion. Light rays from the sun are bent by the atmosphere to make the sun look like it is rising before it actually does. What is a light-year? The distance light can travel in one year's time (in a vacuum). 1 light-minute = 18 million kilometers = 11 million miles. 1 light-hour = 1 billion kilometers = 670 million miles. 1 light-day = 26 billion kilometers = 16 billion miles. 1 light-year = 9 trillion kilometers = 6 trillion miles. Earth is about 8.3 light minutes from the sun. The outer planets are in the realms of light-hours. To get to the nearest stars, we need to use light-years. Proxima Centauri (closest star) is about 4 ly away.Episode 4.notebook April 08, 2014 Pleiades: young star cluster, called 7-sisters, are 400 ly away. A Pleiadan would be seeing Gallileo and the 1600's if they looked at Earth right now. Crab Nebula in Orion is 6500 ly away. The Center of the Galaxy is 30,000 ly away. Sombrero Galaxy is 30 million ly away. We have seen a 13.4 billion year old Galaxy. The Hubble telescope saw that. This would be one of the first generation of galaxies.Episode 4.notebook April 08, 2014 binary star systems: These are two stars that orbit each other. Herschel was the first to discover these, and he found that many many stars are actually binary stars. There are two types of binary star systems. True binary star systems are when they actually orbit each other. There are other stars that LOOK like binary stars, but they are not. These are called double stars, and they happen when a distant star appears behind a nearer star.Episode 4.notebook April 08, 2014 John Hershel (William's son) Made standard catalog of Galaxies & was founder of modern photography. John Mitchell: first person to talk about Dark Stars (black holes). He described how to find them using their gravity. Black Hole: a massive star that runs out of energy to keep fighting gravity. These stars have so much gravity that even the nuclear forces cannot keep the protons and neutrons apart from each other. They collapse into what is called a ‘singularity’ or a super dense cluster of matter. There is a region outside of the singularity where Gravity is soo intense that not even light can escape it. There are Supermassive Black holes in the center of pretty much every galaxy we have looked at. Cygnus X-1: First black hole we found, was actually a star being sucked into it's once companion, now parasitic black hole. What is inside a black hole? Officially: | have no freakin’ clue. We have some guesses: Maybe entire Universes exist. Maybe worm holes that take us to other times and places or Universes.Episode 4.notebook April 08, 2014 Rela wits. Y WU anger exceed the ) speed oF of yht 2) You Cannot add yon! speed to ary \ight Youeat 3) Deopekr Rect . Change in Qeequeny ducts motion UW) Tree alensths A Intron OW object moray Gast wil obserue yime Meoviag Move Slowly