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Showing posts from April, 2017

Red Giants

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Red giants are one of the biggest types of stars. An example of a red giant is Betelgeuse (pronounced bettle juice. Ugh.) and Antares. They are made when fusion in their core actually turns helium into carbon, then carbon into oxygen, then into silicon, then they die when they fuse into iron. They are much too massive and in the end…… BOOM, we have a supernova (Now THAT’S where gold and uranium are made). The biggest red giant known (so far) is UY Scuti, located in the constellation Scutum. To imagine how big it is, UY Scuti has about 1700 times of our Sun’s radius! However it is very far from us (9500 light years away). It is really large at a diameter of 1 - 1.3 billion miles but I think it should be near the end of its life. If it were to replace our Sun, it would instantly swallow Mercury, Venus, and all the way to Saturn. Not only that, but its extremely high gravity would gobble up almost all the solar system objects, and the leftovers would take over a thousand years to...

What is Inertia?

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Have you ever felt like you are being pushed forward when your car brakes suddenly? This is caused by inertia. Inertia is a tendency of an object to maintain its speed. In other words, the object wants to keep a constant speed. If you push a brick along the floor (assuming there is no friction) , then the brick will go on and on and on until someone stops it. Maybe you might want to complain: But when I move bricks across the floor in real life, then why does it keep stopping? This is because there is opposing force acting on the brick known as friction. Friction is a force that is caused by rubbing 2 objects together. It can also create heat. Long time ago, people said that objects have a tendency to stop. Then, in the 1700s, Sir Isaac Newton discovered inertia and proposed that objects actually have a tendency to maintain their speed. Eventually, this is also another of Newton’s laws. I’m quite sure that I will continue to make blogs about physics, science, theo...