FIGURE1.8 Over 2000 eats ago, Ertosthenes calculated the ‘ireumference ofthe Earth using simple geometry ‘at Alexandr cast Sato x = 250,000 stale = 39,300 rm System are called comets. When comets—which can be ‘thought of a large, dirty snowballs (ee Chapter 2)—Ay ‘elatively close to the Su, they heat up and release long tail of gas and dust, Developing a Sense of Shape and Se: ‘The concept that “space is vast” has become ingrained in mod- ern culture—indeed, we use the term astronomical distance to mean “really, really far away” How did our sense of the scale of the Universe, and the objects init, ome to be? Let's start by considering the dimensions of the Earth itself “The Greek astronomer Eratosthenes (ca, 276-194 nice), came up with the frst good estimate of the Earth’ circumference Eratosthenes served asthe chief librarian atthe famous library of ‘Alexandria in Egypt, one of the great centers of learning in the ancient Mediterranean region. One day; he came across a report noting that in the southern Egyptian city of Syene (modern-day Aswan), the Sun lit the base of a deep vertical well precisely at then the Suns rays eould not simultaneously be perpendicular to the Earth’ surface at Alexandria, 800 kim to the north. So on the first day of summer, Eratosthenes measured the shadow cast by a tower in Alexandria at noon, The angle between the tower and the Sun's rays, as indicated by the shadow’s length, proved tw be 72° (Fig 1.8). He then commanded a servant to pace out straight line from Alexandria to Syene. The sore-footed servant fund the distance to be 5,000 stadia. Knowing that a circle con- tains 360°, Eratosthenes then calculated the Earth's creumfer- ‘ence to be 250,000 stadia, using 2 simple equation. Given that 1 stadium = 0.1572 km, his answer came within 2% of today’s accepted value of 40,008 kam. Not long after Eratosthenes' discovery, Greek mathematicians used ingenious geometric cal- culations to estimate that the distance to the Moon is about 30 times the Earth's diameter. This number comes close to the true distance of, on average, 381,555 km. But it wasn’t until the 17th century that astronomers figured out that the mean distance between the Earth and the Sun is 149,600,000 km. As for the stars, the sucient Greeks realized that they must be much far ther away than the Sun in order for them to appear as a fixed backdrop behind the Moon and planets, but the Greeks had no way of calculating the actual distance. Our modern documentation of the vastness of the Universe began in 1838, when astronomers determined that the nearest star to the Earth, Alpha Centauti, lies 40.85 trillion kilometers away. ‘he discovery that light travels a a constant speed of about 300,000 km per second in space provided astronomers with a convenient way to describe the huge distances between objects in space. They define a large distance by stating how long it takes for light to traverse that distance. For example, it takes light about 1.3 seconds to travel from the Earth to the Moon, s0 we ‘ean say that the Moon lies about 1.3 light-seconds away. Similarly, we can say thatthe Sun lies 8.3. ight-minutes away. A light-year, the distance that light travels in one Earth year, is about 95 trillion kilometers. When you look up at Alpha ‘Centauri, 437 light-years distant, you see light that started on is, journey to the Earth 4.37 years ago Astronomers didn't develop techniques for measuring the dlstance to very distant stars and galaxies until the 20th century. ‘With these techniques (described in astronomy books} they dete rained thatthe Milky Way itself has a diameter of about 100,000 light-years, Other galaxies reside so faraway that to the naked Did you ever wonder. how faraway the stars are? noon on the first day of summer. Eratosthenes deduced that the. | eye, they look lke stars in the nighe sk. In fact, the nearest spiral Sun's rays at noon on this day must be exactly perpendicular to the Earth's surface at Syene, and that ifthe Earth was spherical, galaxy t ouss, Andromeda, lies 2.2 million ight-years away. The farthest celestial objects that can be seen with the naked eye are 4.2 Animage of Our Universe 23CONSIDER THIS... Foucault’s Pendulum Ik wasr’t until the midele of the 19th eentury that Léon Foucault (1819-1868), a French physicist, actually proved that the Earth spins on its axis (Fig. Bxt.2a). He made this discovery by set- ting a heavy pendulum, altached to a long cable, In motion (Fig. Bx1.2b), As the pendulum continued to swing, Foucault roted that the plane in which it osclated was perpencicular to the Earth's surface and that this plane rotated around a vertical axis, f Newton's frst law of metion—wihich states that objects In mation remain in motion and objects at rest remain at rest—Was, correct, this phenomenon meant thatthe Earth was rotating under the pendulum while the pendulum continued to swing in the same plane (Fig. Bx1.2¢). Foucault displayed his discovery beneath the ‘great dome ofthe Panthéon in Pris, to much acclaim FIGURE Bx 1.2 Proving the Earth rotates ons axis Line perpendicular ‘portal pa Ne Soin axis Equator plane (a) The Earth rotates around an as Th axis, an imaginary ine thet pierces ine Earn atthe poles and goes through the cantar af the pane, tikes relave to tho plane of the Earth's omit. shout 3 million light-years away: Light from these objects that we see today started on its path to the Barth a million years before the first bominins direct human ancestors) walked the Earth. Powerful telescopes allow us to see much farther. The farthest object yet detected lies over 13 billion light years away. When such numbers became known, people came to the realization that the dimensions of the Universe are truly staggering! Is hard to fathom the distances to planets and stars without visualizing more familiar objects. Imagine a sale madel (a mode! in which dimensions retain the proper proportion) in which an orange represents the Sun, At this scale, the Earth would be & sesame seed at a distance of 15 m from the orange, and Alpha Centauri would lie 2,000 km from the orange. 24 CHAPTER 1 Cosmology nd the Sith ofthe Earth We now know thet the Earth's axis of rotation wobbles, This wobble, known as precession, Islike the wobble of a toy top as it spins. As a result, Polaris isn't aways the North Star. (b) Foucault's experenant At Time (of, the plane in which the pondilum swings isthe aro as he pane of ts frame. At Tmo 2 Wight ‘routs ltr tho plane n which th pandulum swings is perponccwa the pane of is frame, Ballot the pendulum {@) An exact replica of Foucault's oviginal pendulum on splay inthe Pantheon, Par Motions of the Heavens [As you sit in your chair reading this book, you may think that you are motionless, but you arent. Ie just seems that way because everything in the room around you maves at exactly the same velocity as you do. But relative to an observer in intergalactic space, in fact, youre moving quite fast! Let's consider the components ofthis motion, First ofall, the ‘Barth ike all planets, roates or “spins” on its axiy, the imag nary line that passes thtoug the center ofthe Barth and pierces the planet's surface a its two poles. The Earth axis curently tilts at about 23.5° relative t the plane ofits orbit. Because of this rotation, a person siting on the equator (che circumferenceon the surface of the Earth, at a distance halfway between the poles) moves at about 1,674 km per hous, relative o a stationary observer hovering im space nearby—faster than the speed of sound! This spin makes the Sun and stars appear to cxoss the sky daily (Box1.2). The Earth also orbits the Sun, trav- cling counterclockwise along a 920-million-kilometer, slightly elliptical path that takes 2 full year to complete—it moves along. this orbit at about 30 km per second (108,000 km per hour). ‘And finally, the whole Solar System revolves around the center of the Milky Way about once every 250 million years, so we hhurte through space, relative to an observer standing outside the Milky Way, at about 200 km per second (720,000 km per hou). you ever wonder.» how fast you are traveling ‘through space? TAKE-HOME MESSAGE People once thought the Earth ay atthe center of the Universe, Now i's clear that itis one oF eight spinning planets orbiting our Sun, tse one of SOO billon stars of the revolving. spral-shaped Milky Way Galaxy. Hundreds of billons of galaxies speckle the immense visible Universe. ‘QUICK QUESTION: Imagine thatthe distance between the ‘Sun and Alpha Centaur is represented by the length of a city bus. At ths sale, whatis the dammeter ofthe Milo Way/? 1.3 Forming the Universe We stand on a planet in orbit around a star, speeding through space on the arm ofa galaxy. Beyond our galaxy lie hundreds of billions of other galaxies. Where did all this “stufl’—the matter of the Universe—eome from, and when did it Brst form? For most of human history, 2 scientific solution to these questions seemed intractable. But in the 1920s, unexpected observations about the nature of light from distant galaxies set astronomers on a path of discovery that ultimately led to a scientific model of Universe formation known as the Big Bang ‘theory, and this idea has become the foundation of scientific cosmology. To explain these observations, we must frst intro- duce an important phenomenon called the Doppler effect. “Therefore, we begin this section by developing an tnderstand- ing of how the Doppler effect modifies the light seen in tele- scopes. We then show how this understanding leads to the idea that the Universe expands, and then to the conchusion that this expansion began during the Big Bang. Waves and the Doppler Effect When a train whistle sereams, the sound you hear moves through the air from the whistle to your ear in the form of sound waves. Waves are disturbances that transmit energy from one point to another in the form of periodic motions. You'ee probably most familiar with the passage of water waves, luring which the surface of the water goes up and down in & direction perpendicular to the direction the wave moves. The ‘ups form cress, and the downs form troughs. Sound waves are different. As a sound wave passes, air moves back and forth, alternately compressing and expanding, in the direction that the wave moves, The whistle sound is not just one wave, but rather is a succession of many waves. We refer to the distance between successive waves as the wavelength and to the nun ber of waves that pass a point in a given time interval as the frequency. If the wavelength decreases, more waves pass a point in a given time interval, so the frequeney inereases. The “pitch” ofa sound—its note on the musical seale—depends on the frequency ofthe sound waves. Now imagine that you are standing next tothe tracks, and a train moves toward you. The train whistl’s sound gets louder as the train approaches, but its piteh remains the same. Then, the instant the train passes, the pitch abruptly changes—it sounds like a lower note on the musica scale, Why? When the train moves toward you, the sound has a higher frequency (the ‘waves lie eloser together, so the wavelength is smaller) because the sound's source, the whistle, moved slightly closer to you between the instant that itemits one wave and the instant that, it emits the next (Fig. 1.90). When the train moves away from you, the sound has a lower frequency (the waves are farther apart) because the whistle has moved slightly farther from you between the instant it emits one wave and the instant it femits the next. An Austrian physicist, C. J. Doppler (1803— 1853), fist explained this phenomenon, so we now refer to the ‘change in frequency that happens when a wave source moves, as the Doppler effect. Light energy also moves in the form of waves. Physicists consider light to be a form of electromagnetic radiation, ‘energy that can be released by hot or glowing objects and can be transmitted through a vacuum, We can represent light waves symbolically by a periodic succession of erests and troughs. (Ghape-wise these resemble water waves, but otherwise they are very different in character) Visible light comes in many colors—the colors of the rainbow. The color you see depends ‘on the frequency ofthe light waves, just asthe pitch ofa sound you hear depends on the frequency of sound waves. Specifi- ‘ally, red light has a longer wavelength (lower frequency) than does blue light. ‘The Doppler effect also applies to light. If light source moves away from you, the light you see becomes redder as the light shifts to longer wavelengths or lower frequencies. 1.3 Forming the Universe 25FIGURE1.9 Manifestations ofthe Doppler effect fr sound and fo ight ‘The Dops (a) tho wavelongth of sound waves om reiength sn ose ont forsound effect fo 103 bya stationary tai the same inal drectons, Wves behind a moving train have @ longer ‘The Doppler effect, forlignt ae aoe iosnied” woveonmts. WW (b) The woveength of ble ight lass than tht of od ight. fa ight sou ‘The observa shit degends onthe poston of he ooserver Distant salaxy If the source moves toward you, the light you see becomes more blue as the light shifts to higher frequencies. We call these changes the red shift and the blue shift, respectively, (Fig. 1.98). Does the Size of the Universe Change? In the 1920s, astronomers such as Edwin Hubble, after whom, the Hubble Space Telescope was named, braved many a frosty beneath the open dome of a mountaintop observatory in order to aim telescopes into deep space. These researchers were searching for distant galaxies. At frst, they only wanted to document the location and shape of newly discovered galaxies, Eventually, however, they also began to study the wavelength, of light produced by the distant galaxies. The results yielded 26 CHAPTER 1 Cosmology and the Birth of the Earth | | 7 seach ‘Waves that each this observer ate ‘spread out to onger “rec: shited™ wavelengis. L/\J Fed ight (ow requeney (0) The atoms ina star absorb certain specie wa se these wavelengths a carci lngtns one hot 128 or galaxy aban ight years ‘ey ae sified twsrd the red endo! the spectre t0 the "ght relative to the Ines from our ows Sun 1 surprise that would forever change humanity's perception of the Universe. To their amazement, astronomers found that the light coming to che Earth from all distant galaxies dis- played a red shift, relative to the light coming from nearby stars (Fig. 1.9¢) Around 1929, Hubble concluded that the red shift must be aconsequence of the Doppler effect, and so galaxies exhibiting aared shift mast be moving away from the Earth at an immense velocity. How can all galaxies be moving away from us? Hubble puzzled over this question and finally recognized the solution’ the whole Universe must bbe expanding! This i came {0 be known as ‘expanding Universe theory. To picture the expanding ff Did you ever wonder ifgalases move?