If this was the case (and surely it must be), then the distance reduction, with corresponding danger-level increase, would be worth boasting about in the Mos Eisley Cantina. This would mean that, while most ships took the safe option and clocked up an extra 12pc (at least) on their parsecometer, Han managed to shave off some of that extra distance and get his per-parsec expenses claim down below 12pc. Han was plainly talking about a route which is usually all wibbly-wobbly, possibly for saftey reasons (asteroid fields******, empire blockades, black holes etc), but which Han took a less round-about approach to, being all heroic and daring and all. Like all good works of sci-fi with glaring scientific errors, fans are duty-bound to make their hero's apparent mistake fit in with what we know to be right, and show that it is, in fact, us who have been mistaken all along. So Han Solo, epitome of man-ness and worthy role-model for all growing boys (of all ages), was wrong? It comes from the use of parallax***** to determine how far away from the sun you'd have to be for the Sun and Earth to appear to be one arcsecond apart in the sky. The word 'parsec' is a contraction of ' parallax arc second'. Or, if you want it in more space-y terms, it's about 3.26 light-years****, or a bit more than 200,000 AU. One parsec (shortened to 'pc') is almost the same distance as 31 trillion kilometres*** or 19 trillion miles. I'd guess that this is where confusion may be introduced. The second half of the word 'sec' is also commonly used as an abbreviation for the unit of time, the second (as in, 'I'll be back in a sec,'). I won't provide any spoilers here, except to say that the previous sentence was remarkably prescient.Ī parsec is a unit of distance**, so you'd use it to describe how far away something is, rather than how long it took to get there. So for example: 10 0 = 1ġ0 -4 = 1/ 10 × 1/ 10 × 1/ 10 × 1/ 10 = 0.Important edit: In 2018, nine years after this post was first published - NINE YEARS! - the movie Solo: A Star Wars Story was released. The exponent is negative for numbers less than one and indicates dividing by that number of tens. Very small numbers can also be written using powers-of-ten notation. The same number could accurately be rewritten as 38.4 x 10 4 or 0.384 x 10 6, but the preferred form is to have the first number be between one and ten. So for example, the distance to the Moon of 384,000 km can be re-written as 3.84 x 10 5 km. In powers-of-ten notation, numbers are written as a figure between one and ten multiplied by a power of ten. All of the zeros are put in an exponent, which is written as a superscript, and indicates how many zeros you would need to write out the long form of the number. Astronomers use a system called powers-of-ten notation, which consolidates all of the zeros that you would normally find attached to very large or small numbers such as 1,000,000,000,000 or 0.0000000001. To describe such a huge range, astronomers need a way to avoid confusing terms like "a billion trillion" and "a millionth". The distances and sizes of of the objects astronomers study vary from very small, including atoms and atomic nuclei, to very large including galaxies, clusters of galaxies and the size of the universe. 1 pc = 3.09 x 10 13 km = 3.26 lyįor even greater distances, astronomers use kiloparsecs and megaparsecs (abbreviated kpc and Mpc). A parsec is the distance at which 1 AU subtends an angle of 1 arcsec. This is because its definition is closely related to a method of measuring the distances between stars. Many astronomers prefer to use parsecs (abbreviated pc) to measure distance to stars. This means light from Proxima Centauri takes 4.2 years to travel to Earth. Proxima Centauri is the nearest star to Earth (other than the Sun) and is 4.2 light-years away. A light-year is the distance that light travels in a vacuum in one year: 1 ly = 9.5 x 10 12 km = 63,240 AU To measure the distances between stars, astronomers often use light-years (abbreviated ly). The distance from the Sun to the center of the Milky Way is approximately 1.7 x 10 9 AU. Jupiter is about 5.2 AU from the Sun and Pluto is about 39.5 AU from the Sun. An astronomical unit is the average distance between the Earth and the Sun: 1 AU = 1.496 x 10 8 km = 93 million miles However, the distances and sizes in the universe can be so big, that astronomers have invented more units to describe distance.ĭistances in the solar system are often measured in astronomical units (abbreviated AU). They often use meters for length, kilograms for mass, and seconds for time. Astronomers use many of the same units of measurement as other scientists.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |