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Showing posts from October, 2016

Black Holes

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Black Holes are holes in space that absorbs anything in their way, even stars. They are made by a star exploding as supernova and the star must be about 3 times the mass of the sun. This is called the Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit.  Its core will collapse into a neutron star, but its gravity is so strong that it starts sucking in material from outer space and later turns into a black hole.  Once they absorb enough matter to become powerful and massive, they can start creating galaxies. That is why black holes can be found in the heart of galaxies.  Sometimes, black holes will emit the brightest light waves in the universe – quasars.  Now you might be asking, why don’t we see like “blink, blink” from earth? The answer is that they are very far. The furthest quasar from us is about 14 billion light years away. However, we are lucky to be on a planet that isn’t near a black hole. If we were near a black hole, we would get our atmosphere stripped first then ...

Facts About Jupiter

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Now I want talk about Jupiter. Jupiter is the 5 th planet in the solar system. Jupiter is 143,000 kilometers in diameter, making it 11 times the size of Earth. Jupiter is twice as heavy as all the other planets being put together (Makes sense for its size!). Jupiter’s orbit is between 740.9 and 815.7 million kilometers from the Sun. It takes 11.86 years to orbit the sun and its temperatures can plunge to -150° C. Jupiter is mainly made of Hydrogen and Helium. In the core the pressure is so immense that the hydrogen behaves like a metal. Jupiter spins in less than ten hours, it's the 2nd fastest rotating planet. That means the surface is moving approximately at 50,000 km/h. Jupiter has a strong magnetic field (of course) about ten times stronger than earth. Jupiter has a great red spot that is a hurricane three times bigger than earth. The scientist Robert Hooke first spotted it in 1644. There might be something down there that is causing the hurricanes and I think that...

Vectors and Scalars

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I want to talk about Vectors and Scalars . This is about physics. Now you might be asking, what is a vector? Vectors have a magnitude and direction. In case you don’t know, magnitude is the size of the movement, but it’s not distance. Since it’s a vector quantity, it’s called displacement .  For example, the displacement of a leaf being blown by the wind is 50 centimeters to the east. This is a vector quantity because it has a magnitude (50 cm) and a direction (east). And there’s more...  If someone asks you the version of speed in a vector quantity, it’s called velocity .  For example, the velocity of a ball being thrown is 5m/s to the east. In other words, five meters per second to the east.  You can find the displacement as long as you have the velocity and time. Multiply them and you will get the displacement. If the velocity is 5m/s and the time is 10 seconds, you need to multiply them ( 5 x 10 ) to get the displacement, which is 50 meters.  A...