Evacuate Earth Facts
A Neutron star. (View larger version)
- Our solar system orbits around the galaxy once every 210 million years, which means since the beginning of life it has gone around the solar system only 20 times!
- A neutron star is incredible dense and can have the mass of two or three times the sun, but only have a diameter of 10 to 20 miles.
- Because of the neutron star’s incredible density, it’s gravitational pull gets much stronger the closer you get to it. This means that a neutron star has a deep gravity well and that could pull objects apart at they get closer to it.
- A neutron star is so dense and hot that if the Earth came close to one, it would rip the Earth apart and either suck it into the neutron star or the matter would orbit the star and become a ring system.
- An exo-planet is a planet that orbits a star that isn’t our sun. Today, we know of hundreds of exo-planets.
- Kepler is a telescope that is tasked with finding exo-planets, planets orbiting other stars in hopes of finding a planet that can sustain life like Earth.
- Kepler studies the light of a star and looks for a slight drop in the brightness. If this slight drop is repeated, we can determine that there is a planet passing in front of the star and Kepler is seeing the planet’s shadow.
- The Kepler Space telescope has found planets the size of Earth, but that doesn’t mean that they are habitable. For example, Earth and Venus are the same size, but Venus is hot enough to melt lead on its surface. So we’re looking for more than just the right size. Scientists are also looking to see if the planet is in the Goldilocks Zone, the distance from the star where the temperature on the planet would be just right for liquid water. They are also looking for gases like oxygen that would indicate signs of life.
- We can identify gases on other planets like Mars, Venus, or Jupiter by using a technique call spectrometry. For exo-planets that are far away we need a very large telescope. In fact, we have already looked at 30 Earth-like planets with the Hubble Space telescope and Spitzer Space Telescope, but they have turned out to be large hot planets not suitable for life.
- Gravity is one of the major concerns for long term space travel, even taking the 18 month trip to Mars has scientists concerned about astronauts’ health. Without gravity the human body losses muscles mass and the bones suffer from calcium decay. Fortunately, there is a way to create gravity in space –if you have a cylinder that is slowly rotating, the centripetal force on your body is enough to simulate gravity.
- The planet Venus has no magnetic field and if we were to live on it we’d be exposed to much more radiation than we are here on Earth.
