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When do you wish upon a star?
It makes no difference who you are! If the sky is bright and you are patient, you’ll see a shooting star ten to one. And presto!Anything your heart desires will come to you. Your wish is in the bag. Once I did it and ran out of wishes, but the stars kept falling. And then I wondered why they fell at all if there’s no gravity in space. We have all seen astronauts swimming in the air on ISS like fish in the water.But if you think that that it happens as a result of there's zero gravity there, you’ll learn something new today.“Zero gravity” doesn’t mean there is none of it.
If there has been no gravity in the area the world wouldn’t be ready to hold the Moon close to itself.
All the planets and stars would simply fly across the Universe freely, bump into each other and – well, it would probably end things really quickly.
Gravity is small however ne'er absent, this is one of its laws.
As for astronauts and ISS, the Earth's gravity is only 10% less in the orbit than on the ground.
If we tend to build a platform 190-250 miles high (it’s the altitude of ISS higher than Earth) and throw a stone from there it'll slip|crumple} simply identical way
as it falls down from your balcony. This is what happens to Brad Pitt in a science-fiction film “Ad Astral”: (Spoiler alert) he falls down from the tower which is so high that it reaches the upper atmosphere, where is. Now you know that the scriptwriters knew the ABC of physics all right. He was not supposed to float in space.
"What Happens After You Flush on a Cruise Ship?" |
The reason for it's that once within the orbit they're in a very state of a continuing free-fall to Earth, and the ISS itself is also falling to
Earth all the time.
Sounds super crazy?
Don’t forget that the ISS is also moving horizontally above the planet and it kind of mishits every time, and as a result makes a full circle around the Earth following the curve of the planet. The speed that is needed to “mishit” like this is called Earth orbital velocity and is about 5 miles per second or 17,500 miles per hour. Sometimes ISS still gets lower and approaches Earth. To compensate for this, the space station control center corrects its orbit and switches on its engines for a short time to raise it to a former altitude. If you have not become an astronaut as you wanted as kiddo, you still have a chance to feel like one on the ground. When you sit in a car of a roller-coaster and it first rises up to the top of the track and then falls down abruptly, you’ll be in a free fall and feel like astronauts do pretty much all the time. Another way is to take a flight on a small jet which can do aerial stunts. When it flies a pattern called a parabola, you’ll also be in a zero-gravity state for some time.
Not the most pleasant feeling, right?
That said, why don’t they raise ISS higher above the Earth where astronauts won’t have to free fall?
Astronauts will stay ISS for therefore long as a result of the topmost atmosphere protects them from radiation.
At the altitude higher than 310 miles, there area unit radiation belts that have a damaging impact on humans.
And then, if ISS rises too high, the Earth’s gravity will become too weak to hold it and it will leave the Earth’s orbit. That’s why those super guys have to train hard on special zero-gravity simulators before they go to space.
But there is “zero gravity” in open space, isn’t there -- you might ask?
Or how would spaceships manage to fly to the Moon or other planets?
If a body is far enough from a space object (say, a spaceship flying to Mars from Earth)the gravity of the space object will be too small, and their mutual attraction will roughly balance each other. But no matter how far the bodies get from each other, their mutual attraction never equals zero. The Earth falls down to the Sun the same way as ISS falls on Earth but since its lateral velocity is big enough it’s been doing this for 5 billion years.
"What Happens After You Flush on a Cruise Ship?" |
What we take for shooting stars are just small stones floating in space and their orbit or our orbit, makes us run into each other. When the objects meet our planet, they bump into the atmosphere at a high speed and squeeze the air in front of them.
The speed is thus high that the air gets super-hot and starts shining.
When you look at this from the ground you don’t see the shining gas and a stone behind it, it just looks like stars, the same as others in the sky, are falling down on Earth. Soon they go out before they make it to the ground. Since they are just hundreds of feet away from us they seem to be the same size as true stars that are thousands of light-years away. In science, shooting stars are called meteors.
If components of meteors do reach the Earth's surface they're known as meteorites.
Super bright meteors are called fireballs.
Hundreds of voluminous meteors seem within the atmosphere daily.
Their total weight can be thousands of tons. And about 100 tons of dust particles which are too small to be visible in the atmosphere fall down on Earth from space daily. Most of them just burn there without a trace. On some days of the year, meteors appear in the sky much more often than usual. This is what they call a meteoric shower in science and what we call a star shower: one can see dozens of meteors in a single hour. I guess this is what was happening when I wished upon a star.
Where does the star shower come from?
When a comet is getting closer to the Sun it gets heated and starts losing its matter. It takes several hundred years for its particles to form a stretched out “tail” along the comet orbit. When the Earth crosses this flow, which happens every year, we see a star shower.
"What Happens After You Flush on a Cruise Ship?" |
Everybody knows that it’s not safe! In fact, no.
Meteors will kind as a result of a collision of another planet and a smaller house object.
Thousands of stones appear as a result of it, and they start moving in their own direction. When their flight is directed towards Earth they finally get into the atmosphere and become shooting stars.
Small house bodies will have quite a completely different direction however if they are available too near to the world, its gravity will turn them around and pull down.
As for comets and bigger meteors, they do not appear out of the blue sky.
Astronomers watch closely all the massive house objects that would probably get too near to our planet once moving on their orbit.
At least we’ll know about this on time and will be able to send Bruce Willis and his buddies to deal with it.
If you trace the method of meteors on the sky it'll appear that all of them fly out of a similar spot.
It is called a meteoroid stream radiant. This is just an optical illusion and it appears because of such an effect as perspective. We can see the same effect when we see a railroad track and see that the rails meet on the horizon. In reality, meteor particles are moving along parallel trajectories, just as rail tracks do. Astronomers have found several dozens of meteoroid streams. They are usually called after the names of constellations where their radiant is. Perseid have a radiant in the constellation of Perseus, and you can observe them in the middle of August. So mark the date in your calendar and be ready for a star shower!
Do you know anything else about shooting stars?
BRIGHT SITE OF LIFE ONE
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