11 misconceptions about space that educated people shouldn't believe

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

It's time to debunk another batch of myths about the color of Mars, the size of the Moon, the buoyancy of Saturn and the explosiveness of Jupiter.

1. Mars is red

Mars is called the Red Planet by all. Indeed, if you look at photographs taken from a distance, you can clearly see this. But if you open a photo of the Mars Curiosity Image Gallery of the surface of Mars, taken by the rovers Curiosity, Opportunity and Sojourner, you will see a yellowish-orange desert with only a slight touch of red.

So what color is Mars? Maybe all the photos from the rovers are fake?

In fact, to say that Mars is red is not entirely true. This color is rusty, rich in oxidized iron dust and suspended particles in the planet's atmosphere. They make Mars look crimson from orbit. But if you look at the soil of the planet not through the thickness of the atmosphere, but standing right on the surface, you will see such a yellowish landscape.

In addition, depending on the surrounding minerals, territories on Mars can be golden, brown, tan, or even greenish. So the Red Planet has many colors.

2. The earth has unique resources

In many science fiction films and novels, aliens attack the Earth and try to capture it, because it contains valuable substances that cannot be found on other planets. It is often said that the target of the invaders is water. After all, supposedly only on Earth there is liquid water, which, as you know, is the source of life.

But in fact, the aliens who flew to Earth to take water from people are like the Eskimos invading Norway to capture the ice there.

Once upon a time, water was really considered a rare resource in the Universe, but now astronomers know for sure that there is plenty of it in space. Both in liquid and frozen form, it is found on many planets and satellites: on the Moon, Mars, Titan, Enceladus, Ceres, a huge number of comets and asteroids. Pluto is 30% water ice. And outside the solar system, water is often found in the form of ice or gas around stars and in stellar nebulae.

Other resources, such as minerals, metals and gases that can serve as building materials and fuel, are also much more numerous in space than on Earth. There are even planets - diamonds and clouds of finished methyl alcohol!

So if aliens flew to Earth, the extraction of water and minerals would be the last thing they were interested in. A civilization that has mastered interstellar travel has access to an unimaginable amount of ownerless resources that can be mined without being distracted by the resistance of earthlings. By the way, it is not a fact that alien life forms generally need to drink water.

3. The moon is located quite close to the Earth

Look out the window on the next full moon and take a closer look at our satellite. The moon seems so close sometimes, doesn't it? It is not surprising that sometimes in popular science books they draw her being very close to the Earth and do not even leave a note like “Distance scale not respected”.

But in reality, the moon is far away. Very far. We are separated by 384 400 km. If you decided to get to the moon on a Boeing 747, then, moving at full speed, you would fly to it for 17 days. The Apollo 11 astronauts did it a little faster and got there in four days. But still, the distance is amazing. Just look at this from the Japanese Hayabusa-2 probe.

So to show the full moon occupying half of the sky, as Hollywood filmmakers like it, is wrong. In fact, if our satellite were so close to Earth, it would fall on it, provoking a monstrous catastrophe and destroying all life on the planet.

4. If there was a large enough ocean, Saturn would float in it

This myth is found in a huge number of popular science articles. It sounds something like this. Saturn is a gas giant, its mass is 95 times the Earth, and its diameter is about nine times its diameter. But at the same time, the average density of Saturn, consisting of hydrogen, helium and ammonia, is approximately 0.69 g / cm³, which is less than the density of water.

This means that if there were some unimaginably huge ocean, Saturn would float on its surface like a ball.

Imagine a picture? So, this is utter nonsense. Perhaps someone could swim in Saturn (for a split second, until it is crushed by monstrous pressure and burned by hellish temperatures), but Saturn himself cannot do this. There are two reasons for this - they were named by Rhett Allen, a physicist at the University of Southeast Louisiana.

Firstly, Saturn is not a ping-pong ball, but a gas giant, it has no solid surface. It will not be able to hold its shape even if it is placed in water.

Secondly, it is impossible to create an ocean large enough to accommodate Saturn. If you combine such a mass of water, as well as the mass of Saturn itself, then nuclear fusion will inevitably begin. And Saturn, together with the cosmic ocean, will become a star.

So if you don't want the Sun to have a little twin brother, leave Saturn alone.

5. Only Saturn has rings

By the way, something else about this gas giant. In all books, Saturn is very easy to recognize by its rings - this is a kind of visiting card of the planet. They were first discovered by Galileo Galilei in 1610. The rings are made up of billions of solid stone particles - from grains of sand to pieces the size of a good mountain.

Due to the fact that Saturn is always depicted with rings, while other gas giants are not, many people have the opinion that he is unique. But this is not the case. Other giant planets - Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune - also have ring systems, but just not so impressive.

Moreover, even such small objects as the asteroid Chariklo have rings. Apparently, earlier he had a satellite, which was torn apart by tidal forces and, as a result, turned into a ring.

6. Jupiter can be made a star by detonating an atomic bomb in it

When the Galileo space probe, which had been studying Jupiter for eight years, began to fail, NASA deliberately sent it to Jupiter to burn up in the upper atmosphere of the giant. Some readers of news portals on the Internet then raised the alarm: Galileo was carrying a plutonium radioisotope thermoelectric generator.

And this thing could potentially provoke a nuclear reaction in the bowels of Jupiter! The planet is made of hydrogen, and a nuclear explosion would ignite it, turning Jupiter into a second sun. It's not for nothing that they call him "a failed star"?

A similar idea was present in Arthur Clarke's novel 2061: Odyssey Three. There, an alien civilization transformed Jupiter into a new star called Lucifer.

But, naturally, no catastrophe happened. Jupiter did not become a star or a hydrogen bomb, and will not become one, even if millions of probes are dropped on it. The reason is that it does not have enough mass to trigger nuclear fusion. To turn Jupiter into a star, you will need to throw 79 of the same Jupiters onto it.

In addition, it is wrong to assume that the plutonium RTG at Galileo is something like an atomic bomb. It cannot explode. In the worst case, the RTG will collapse and contaminate everything around with pieces of radioactive plutonium. On Earth it will be unpleasant, but not fatal. On Jupiter, such a hell is going on all the time that even a real atomic bomb will not particularly affect the situation.

And yes, even turning Jupiter into a brown dwarf star would not make much of a difference to life on Earth. According to Robert Frost, an astrophysicist at NASA, small stars such as OGLE ‑ TR ‑ 122b, Gliese 623b, and AB Doradus C are about 100 times Jupiter in mass.

And if we replace it with one such dwarf, we get a reddish dot in the sky 20% larger than it has now. The Earth will begin to receive about 0.02% more heat energy than it receives now, when we have only one Sun. It won't even affect the climate.

The only thing that could change as Jupiter turns into a star, says Frost, is the behavior of insects that use moonlight to navigate. The new star will shine about 80 times brighter than the full moon.

7. Landing SpaceX stages with parachutes would be cheaper

The space company SpaceX Elon Musk is famous for regularly launching reusable Falcon 9 rockets. After completion, the first stage of the launch vehicle is deployed in the air with engines forward and is launched into a controlled fall. Then, with thrust turned on, the rocket gently lands on a SpaceX floating barge in the ocean or on a prepared landing pad on Earth. It can be refueled and sent flying again, which is cheaper than building a new one every time.

In the comments under the video with SpaceX launches, you can often come across the opinion that carrying fuel for landing a rocket and retractable supports is a waste of carrying capacity, and that it would be much more profitable to attach a parachute to the first stage. An example is the devices used for the landing of combat vehicles.

But in reality, landing the Falcon 9 stages with parachutes would not work. There are several reasons for this.

Firstly, the first stage of the Falcon 9 is quite fragile, as it is made of an aluminum-lithium alloy. It is much less compact and sturdy than airborne combat vehicles. The parachute landing is too hard for her. The side boosters of the Shuttle parachuted were made of steel and were much stronger than the Falcon 9, and even then they did not always survive the collision with the ocean at a speed of 23 m / s.

The second reason: parachute landing is not very accurate, and SpaceX would simply overshoot steps past its landing barges. And falling into the water for a Falcon 9 means being seriously damaged.

And finally, thirdly, those who believe that airborne parachutes are very light and will not damage the carrying capacity of the Falcon 9 have simply never seen them. Some multi-dome systems can weigh up to 5.5 tons, given that they have a payload of 21.5 tons.

In general, until anti-gravity was invented, rocket landing is the best way to preserve it.

8. The collision of the Earth with asteroids is a catastrophic, but rare phenomenon

Many people, reading headlines like "A new, previously unnoticed asteroid is approaching Earth!" In the news, tense up. In fact, everyone remembers not so long ago the fall of the Chelyabinsk meteorite, which caused so much noise.

The power of the explosion provoked by him, NASA estimated at 300-500 kilotons. And this is about 20 times the power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. But in history there have been collisions with asteroids and more impressive, for example, with Chikshulub 66, 5 million years ago. The impact energy was 100 teratons, which is 2 million times more than the Kuzkina Mother atomic bomb.

As a result, a sickly crater was formed and a lot of dinosaurs and other living creatures became extinct.

After such horrors, you involuntarily begin to believe that the fall of an asteroid is certainly a catastrophe worse than any atomic explosion. At the very least, you can thank heaven for the fact that it does not send such "gifts" so often. Or not?

In fact, the collision of the Earth with asteroids is an extremely common phenomenon. Every day, an average of 100 tons of cosmic particles fall on our planet. True, most of these pieces are the size of a grain of sand, but there are also fireballs with a diameter of 1 to 20 m. For the most part, they burn up in the atmosphere.

Every year, the Earth gets a little heavier, as from the sky from 37 to 78 thousand tons of space debris falls on it. But our planet is neither cold nor hot from this.

9. The Moon makes one revolution around the Earth per day

This myth is a very childish one, but, oddly enough, even some adults can sincerely believe in it. The moon is a night star, it is visible at night, but not visible during the day. Therefore, at this time, the moon is above the other hemisphere. This means that the Moon makes one revolution around the Earth per day. It makes sense, right?

In fact, the period of the Moon's revolution around the Earth is approximately 27 days. This is the so-called sidereal month. And to think that the moon is not visible during the day is somewhat naive, because it is visible, and very often, although it depends on its phase. In the first quarter, the Moon can be seen in the afternoon in the eastern part of the sky. In the last quarter, the moon is visible until noon on the west side.

10. Black holes suck in everything around

In popular culture, a black hole is often portrayed as a kind of "space vacuum cleaner". It slowly but surely attracts all the surrounding objects and sooner or later absorbs them: stars, planets, and other cosmic bodies. This makes black holes seem like a distant but inevitable threat.

But in fact, from the point of view of orbital mechanics, a black hole is not very different from a star or a planet. You can rotate around it in the same way, in a stable orbit.

And if you do not approach her, then nothing particularly bad will happen to you.

Fearing that you will be sucked in from a stable orbit by a black hole is like worrying that the Earth will be sucked in and swallowed by the Sun. By the way, if we replace it with a black hole of the same mass, we will die from the cold, and not from falling beyond the event horizon.

Although yes, one day the Sun will really swallow the Earth - in 5 billion years, when it turns into a red giant.

11. Weightlessness is the absence of gravity

Seeing how astronauts fly aboard the ISS in a state of zero gravity, many people begin to believe that this is possible due to the absence of gravity in space. As if the force of gravity acts only on the surfaces of planets, but not in space. But if this were true, how would all celestial bodies move in their orbits?

Weightlessness arises due to the rotation of the ISS in a circular orbit at a speed of 7, 9 km / s. The astronauts seem to be constantly "falling forward." But this does not mean that the forces of gravity are turned off. At an altitude of 350 km, where the ISS flies, the acceleration of gravity is 8.8 m / s², which is only 10% less than on the Earth's surface. So gravity is fine there.

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