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The vastness of space truly boggles the mind. A couple of years ago I was having dinner with some friends. One guy, visiting from NYC, is a professor of astrophysics. My son and I got him in a corner and tried to get him to explain infinity to us. He really couldn’t. With the discovery of that Kepler-22B, it’s even more confusing. How on earth (no pun intended) can these rocket scientists predict how many millions of light years away we are from that planet? How can they even see it with the Hubble Telescope?
"Next on Unsolved Mysteries....."
“The vastness of space truly boggles the mind.”
Yes, I was reading a book this summer, Multiple Universes, by Kaku and he said that astronomers estimate that we can only see a small part of what is out there, that if the universe was the size of a basket ball, what we can see would be only the size of a quarter.
Yes, I was reading a book this summer, Paralell Worlds, by Kaku and he said that astronomers estimate that we can only see a small part of what is out there. He said that if the universe were the size of a basket ball, what we can see would be the size of a quarter.
Yes, I was reading a book this summer, Parallel Worlds, by Kaku and he said that astronomers estimate that we can only see a small part of what is out there. He said that if the universe were the size of a basket ball, what we can see would be the size of a quarter.
They can estimate the distance by a couple methods. For some objects, they can use the principle of parralax, basically, taking measurements when the Earth is at one end of its orbit, and then comparing to when we are at the other end of the orbit in order to get a triangulation. If that doesn’t work, they usually rely on the redshift values of the star and any objects in front of or behind it to get an estimation. The redshift value tells them how fast the star is moving away from us, and from that try to estimate the distance.