Astronomy 1021 Chapter 1 Reading Notes: A Modern

View of the Universe

Chapter 1.3: Spaceship Earth

- Earth moves through rotations (spins) and yearly orbits (also known as revolution)
around the Sun
• Earth rotates once a day
• Rotates from west to east
- Explain why sun rises from the east and sets in the west
• counter clockwise
• Earth orbits around the Sun once a year
- average distance from the Earth and Sun is 1 AU = 150 million km
- it travels/ moves 100,000 km/hr
• Ecliptic plane: the plane of Earth’s orbit around the sun
- earth’s axis is tilted at 23.5 degrees from a line perpendicular to the ecliptic plane
• Axis tilt: the amount by which a planet’s axis is tilted with respect to a line
perpendicular to the ecliptic plane
- axis points almost directly at a star called Polaris or the North Star
- Earth rotates counter clockwise around the sun
• NOTE: this was actually a consequence of the way the earth was born
- Our solar system completes 1 orbit of the galaxy in about 230 million years
- Stars at different distances from the galactic center orbit at different speeds
- Most mass of the galaxy seems to be located outside the visible disk
• Occupying the galactic halo that surrounds and encompasses the disk
- Dark matter: matter that we infer to exist from its gravitational effects but from which
we have not detected any light
- Dark energy: energy that can be causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate
- Galaxies mover relative to one another
• within the local group, some galaxies move toward us and others away from us
• smaller galaxies orbit around the Milky Way galaxy
- Recognitions by Edwin Hubble:
1. virtually every galaxy outside the Local Group is moving away from us
2. the more distant the galaxy, the faster it appears to be racing away
- NOTE: the entire universe is expanding
- The Raison Cake Analogy:
• pick any raison and make it the “Local Raison”
• place in oven and after time take it out to see how the raisons moved away from
the Local Raison
• The Point: as the cake expands, the raisons move away from the Local Raison,
with more distant raisons moving away faster
• NOTE: A raison cake has a center and edges, but we don’t think the same for the
entire universe
• NOTE: we can’t see galaxies moving apart with time b/c the distances are too vast
for any motion to be noticeable